Source: Forbes
5/6/2013
The article examines the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) authority in antitrust cases. Joshua Wright, currently on leave from George Mason University while serving with the Federal Trade Commission, is quoted.
As Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioner Josh Wright correctly explained in a recent speech at George Mason, the FCC erred in the Open Internet Order by treating discrimination by vertically integrated network owners as a per se violation, in contrast to the “rule of reason” treatment afforded to similar “vertical restraints” under the antitrust laws. Mr. Wright advocates that the FTC (and not the FCC) police such conduct under the antitrust laws, arguing that the FTC is less susceptible to political influence than the FCC, and that the FTC has related experience with case-by-case enforcement of vertical restraints.
more
Source: The Wall Street Journal
5/5/2013
New York University Law Professor Richard Epstein provides a critical review of Steven J. Harper’s new book, the “The Lawyer Bubble.”
With Congress passing monstrosities like Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act, top-flight legal talent is needed more than ever to guide well-heeled clients through the growing regulatory maze.
[L]aw schools can’t just be “practical training” centers, as Mr. Harper would have them; they must make sure that their students grasp the fundamentals of legal theory and doctrine. Future lawyers must also be capable of connecting law with collateral disciplines ranging from corporate finance to game theory to cognitive psychology. That is what I teach, and that is also what firms want when they hire me to work on complex legal problems.
Mr. Harper's blunderbuss condemnation of most large firms and most law schools is off-target. By and large, they have proved resilient in a competitive legal climate.
more
Source: The New Yorker
5/3/2013
In his article for The New Yorker, Columbia University law professor Tim Wu examines issues facing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
The net-neutrality rules now in place reinforce the Internet’s original design principle: that all traffic is carried equally and without any special charges beyond those of transmission. Among other things, the rules are a pricing truce for the Internet; without them, we can expect a fight that will serve no one’s interests and will ultimately stick consumers with Internet bills that rise with the same speed as cable television’s.
Unfortunately… the F.C.C. may ultimately have no choice but to get involved in this fight. But one very important thing has changed since last time. Cable operators like Time Warner and Comcast, if they think carefully, should come to understand that they now need a net-neutrality rule more than anyone.
more
Source: Reuters
5/3/2013
The article looks at China’s anti-monopoly law and its impact on European and American companies seeking global mergers. Law professor Daniel Sokol, University of Florida, is quoted.
"Sometimes the remedies have nothing to do with antitrust concerns, but you are so desperate to close a deal that you give up the store to the Chinese," said Daniel Sokol, professor of law at the University of Florida's Levin College of Law. "Firms will make all kinds of concessions. If this were the United States, people would say: I'll see you in court. No one's going to do that in China," he said.
Sokol, the law professor, said in some extreme cases, there are fears that corporate monitors could facilitate industrial espionage when oversight has little to do with antitrust issues but focuses instead on organisational structure, operational management and supply chain distribution.
"It's them (the government) thinking: we're not in this space but we want to create a national champion here, and in order to do that we have to understand how these businesses work," he said.
more
Source: America Public Radio’s Marketplace
4/19/2013
The story explains the proposed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. Law professor Jonathan Zittrain, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, co-authored the article and is quoted.
Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law at Harvard and Co-Founder and Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, says the White House is critical of the bill on two opposing fronts.
"The Administration has said it doesn't go far enough, but the administration also echoes a lot of the worries of civil libertarians about the vagueness of the purposes to which the information could be put and the broad scope of immunity [for] private sector companies should they choose to share that information," Zittrain says.
more
Source: The Los Angeles Times
4/17/2013
The article examines the surveillance of public areas, and the trade-off between security and privacy. Ryan Calo, University of Washington School of Law, is quoted.
"It's true that a great deal of our lives, particularly in public, are recorded today. But for the time being, it's fairly atomized," said Ryan Calo, an assistant law professor and privacy specialist at the University of Washington. Unlike a government-controlled surveillance system, Calo said, much of the information-gathering in the United States is being done by private companies for specific, private purposes, such as warding off shoplifters. "Then the question becomes, what does it take to access these atomized sources of recordings?"
It's fine when government investigators pour through the data in response to an attack like the one in Boston, Calo said. What's troubling, he added, is when the government uses such routinely collected data to try to identify suspects pre-emptively, before there's any evidence that a crime is being planned. The Founders weren't willing to give the government that much discretion, Calo said.
more
Source: Nature World News
4/9/2013
The article looks into the legal implications of driver-less cars. Ryan Calo, University of Washington School of Law, is quoted.
Ryan Calo of the University of Washington law school proposes that Congress allow the kind of selective immunity seen in firearm manufacturing - an immunity that would only apply when "it is clear that the robot was under the control of the consumer, a third party software, or otherwise the result of end-user modification."
more
Source: C|Net
4/9/2013
The article debates ways robot enthusiasts can protect self-driving cars and other autonomous machines from the looming existential threat of class action lawsuits. Ryan Calo, University of Washington School of Law, is quoted.
Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington law school, has proposed extending selective immunity to robot makers in much the same way that Congress has provided selective immunity to firearm manufacturers and (through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Telecommunications Act of 1996) Internet services providers. Calo suggests that the immunity would only apply when "it is clear that the robot was under the control of the consumer, a third party software, or otherwise the result of end-user modification."
more
Source: NPR’s All Things Considered
4/3/2013
This story looks at the role social media companies have in dictating online speech rules. Professor Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University School of Law, is quoted.
Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, says social media companies have a tremendous role in dictating online speech.
Facebook, Google and Twitter "have more power over who can speak and what can be said all across the globe than any king or president or Supreme Court justice," he says.
"But unlike presidents, Facebook is not constrained by the Constitution," Rosen adds. "The First Amendment only binds the government — not private corporations."
more
Source: The New York Times
3/30/2013
In a series of intriguing experiments, Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University, shows that people often reveal more than they mean to online. His work was recently profiled in a New York Times article, “Letting Down Our Guard With Web Privacy.” Below are a few excerpts:
Professor Acquisti: “My role is not telling people what to do. My role is showing why we do certain things and what may be certain consequences. Everyone will have to decide for themselves.”
Those who follow his [Acquisti’s] work say it has important policy implications as regulators in Washington, Brussels and elsewhere scrutinize the ways that companies leverage the personal data they collect from users.
Mr. Acquisti has been at the forefront, testifying in Congress and conferring with the F.T.C. David C. Vladeck, who until recently headed the agency’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said Mr. Acquisti’s research on facial recognition spurred the commission to issue a report on the subject last year. “No question it’s been influential,” Mr. Vladeck said of Mr. Acquisti’s work.
“The technologist in me loves the amazing things the Internet is allowing us to do,” he said. “The individual who cares about freedom is concerned about the technology being hijacked, from a technology of freedom into a technology of surveillance.”
“What worries me,” he said, “is that transparency and control are empty words that are used to push responsibility to the user for problems that are being created by others.”
more
Source: Reason
3/26/2013
This article examines the pushback from the courts and Congress on the use of flying, spying robot weapons at home and abroad. Ryan Calo, University of Washington School of Law, and his article, “The Drone as Privacy Catalyst” are quoted.
In an influential 2011 article, "The Drone as Privacy Catalyst," law professor Ryan Calo predicted that the dystopian images that drones evoke could spur much-needed reforms to American privacy law. Their association with military spying and targeted killing, the way they "represent the cold, technological embodiment of observation," would provide the "visceral jolt" that reformers need to make their case.
Professor Calo, who testified at Wednesday's hearing, warned that "American privacy law places few limits on aerial surveillance" and urged Congress to "instruct the FAA to take privacy into account as part of its mandate to integrate drones into domestic airspace."
more
Source: Bloomberg
3/26/2013
The article questions the impartiality of Google’s search results as European Union regulators are trying to end an antitrust probe of the operator of the world’s biggest search engine. Economics professor Susan Athey, Stanford University, offers her findings from a recent experiment she conducted aimed at quantifying the extent to which search order matters.
Internet traffic can be diverted by manipulating the order of search results, said Susan Athey, a professor of economics at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and a Microsoft consultant, in a blog post on Microsoft’s website. When a site is moved from the first position to the 10th position in a series of search results, it typically will lose about 85 percent of its traffic, she said.
“Impartiality of search results will become all the more important in the years to come, given that screen sizes on smartphones and tablets are smaller than on traditional PCs,” Athey said. “Smaller screens mean there is even less room for competing services to appear in Google’s mobile search.”
more
Source: The New York Times
3/20/2013
The article covers a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on drones. Ryan Calo, University of Washington School of Law, was one of the witnesses and is quoted in the article.
“There’s very little in American privacy law that would limit the use of drones for surveillance,” said one witness, Ryan Calo, an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law. “Drones drive down the cost of surveillance considerably. We worry that the incidence of surveillance will go up.”
more
Source: American Constitution Society
3/20/2013
The article covers a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on drones. Ryan Calo, University of Washington School of Law, was one of the witnesses and is quoted in the article.
During his testimony, Ryan Calo, assistant professor of law at the University of Washington, reiterated the need for the nation to update laws to protect privacy – technology is fast outpacing laws protecting privacy.
“Drones have a lot of people worried about privacy – and for good reason,” Calo told the Senate committee. “Drones drive down the cost of aerial surveillance to worrisome levels. Unlike fixed cameras, drones need not rely on public infrastructure or private partnerships. And they can be equipped not only with video cameras and microphones, but also the capability to sense heat patterns, chemical signatures, or the presence of a concealed firearm.
“American privacy law,” he continued, “meanwhile, places few limits on aerial surveillance. We enjoy next to no reasonable expectation of privacy in public, or from a public vantage like the nation’s airways. The Supreme Court has made it clear through a series of decisions in the nineteen-eighties that there is no search for Fourth Amendment purposes if an airplane or helicopter permits officers to peer into your backyard. I see no reason why these precedents would not extend readily to drones.”
more
Source: Wired
3/15/2013
The article discusses the “First to File” component of the America Invents Act that went into effect mid-March. Robert Barr, Executive Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, is quoted.
“It’s a big deal, and all the patent attorneys I know are busy right now, filing applications before that goes into effect, Saturday, which tells me that most of their clients are better off under the old system,” says Robert Barr, a professor of intellectual property law at UC-Berkeley, though he adds that some of the rush is simply due to uncertainty about how the new law will play out.
“Under the old system, if you kept lab notebooks … you could prove you were the first inventor even if you were not the first to file, so you didn’t necessarily have to be the first to get to the patent office,” he says. “Now, with a few exceptions, you need to be the first. If two people come up with the same invention, and they often do … it’s not going to matter if you can prove you were the first inventor if you weren’t the first to file.”
more
Source: NPR’s Marketplace
3/15/2013
Marketplace’s David Brancaccio talks with Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia Media Studies, about Google’s decision to end its Google Reader service.
"Look, Google works for Google," says Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of the The Googlization of Everything. "Google doesn't work for us, it doesn't work for the government, it doesn't answer to our needs as citizens."
"Google is deciding to double-down on its vision for being the operating system of our lives, not just the operating system of the web," Vaidhyanathan says. "The web may be something we think of as a sort of quaint medium in 10 years."
more
Source: NBC News
3/14/2013
The article examines the different types of unmanned flying machines. Ryan Calo, University of Washington School of Law, is quoted.
Ryan Calo, a professor of law at the University of Washington, also calls them drones. To him, a drone needs to have three qualities: First, it needs to be able to fly. Then, it needs to have some sensing capacity: a camera or an infrared sensor, or similar. And finally, Calo's drones are capable of some level of autonomy, perhaps following GPS coordinates or a moving guide.
Though Anderson and Calo argue that "drone" implies autonomy, while military and professional groups say the opposite, the contradiction doesn't bother Calo. "I don’t think at the end of the day we need to all agree on a term," he tells NBC News, "Language is dynamic."
more
Source: NPR’s Talk of the Nation
3/14/2013
The story discusses a New York federal court case that found a former New York City police officer guilty of plotting to kidnap and cook his wife and other women. The defense argued that Gilberto Valle never acted on his fantasies, and described the verdict as a case of thought prosecution. Professor Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University School of Law, brings his expertise to the debate.
In this case - is this thought, or is this a crime?
Well, it seems right on the line, which is why it's such a fascinating case. … And as you've been discussing, conspiracy requires that you have an intent to create - take a conspiracy, that you actually take active steps to join it, and then that you take some overt act in furtherance of it.
And the difficulty is that the overt acts themselves, like Internet searches, are just as compatible with fantasy as with an attempt to carry out a real murder. … And there are all sorts of conspiracies that you'd want to nip in the bud, prosecute in advance. A real murder, obviously, has to be stopped before it's carried out, and a real kidnapping. It's not really the case that the Internet has changed everything, and the fact that this takes place online means that what used to be fantasy is now criminal. It's just the case that the overt acts allegedly offered as furthering the conspiracy themselves could be considered thought crimes - Google searches and so forth. Many of us search for things that we think about, but don't intend to follow through on.
Obviously, there's this broader question of whether it's possible to prosecute purely virtual conduct.
more
Source: The New York Times
3/10/2013
The New York Times “Room for Debate” section asked TAP scholar Carl Shapiro to help answer the questions: Are megadeals something to cheer or fear?
In “Many Mergers Can Make Sense for Consumers,” Professor Shapiro says that “With the exception of a small minority, these deals make companies and the economy work more efficiently.”
One of the strengths of the U.S. economy is flexibility: our economy is unusually good at redeploying resources.
The job of the Justice Department and the F.T.C. is to stop mergers that enrich the merging companies at the expense of consumers by reducing competition. We should not rely on the government to stop mergers that destroy shareholder value. Those "dumb" mergers often cause collateral damage to workers, customers and communities. Stopping them is the job of shareholders.
more
Source: Investor’s Business Daily
3/8/2013
Economist professor Nicholas Economides, New York University, provides his insight into the $731 million fine the European Union imposed against Microsoft over the company's failure to continue providing Windows PC users a Web browser choice screen.
"This fine is extraordinary. It's huge, for something that for all intents and purposes looks like a mistake," said Nicholas Economides, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business.
The issue: Microsoft provided the browser choice screen for European PCs starting in March 2010. But the browser choice screen inadvertently disappeared when Microsoft released its Windows 7 Service Pack 1 in May 2011. Microsoft said the browser choice ballot was left off accidentally and reinstated in July 2012.
"Microsoft should have been careful to not have a technical glitch. But to charge them more than $700 million on a technical glitch sounds excessive to me," Economides said. It's far-fetched to believe that Microsoft would have intentionally disobeyed its agreement with the EU, he said.
The original agreement was not so much about providing consumer choice, but punishing Microsoft, Economides says. That's because the only PC users presented with the Web browser choice screen were those who had PCs with Internet Explorer set as the default. This gave Google and rival browser makers an incentive to pay PC makers to get their browsers set as the default on European PCs, he says.
The EU's continued focus on Microsoft distracts them from more pressing concerns, Economides says. In particular, Europe has a pending antitrust investigation into Google's handling of its Internet search results.
"They're essentially fighting the last war," Economides said.
more
Source: Bloomberg
3/7/2013
The article examines Samsung’s increased spending on lobbyists in their efforts to influence the federal government on issues ranging from intellectual-property infringement to telecommunications infrastructure. Law professors R. Polk Wagner, University of Pennsylvania, and Mark Lemley, Stanford University share their expertise.
“Samsung is being sued left and right,” said R. Polk Wagner, a professor of intellectual-property law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “A major component of their business is smartphones, and this is becoming a very litigious area.”
The greater focus on lobbying by technology companies reflects the growing importance of U.S. laws and regulations to the industry as Congress considers issues from patents to Internet privacy to copyright infringement, said Mark Lemley, who teaches patent law at Stanford Law School in California.
“It’s just an increasingly important part of their business,” Lemley said. “What happens in Washington can significantly affect the lives of technology companies, and they can’t ignore it.”
more
Source: Wall Street Journal
3/3/2013
The article follows a television studio’s efforts to impede online piracy of their episodes. Law professor James Grimmelmann, New York University, is quoted.
It has taken the arrival of high-speed broadband to make that [pirating TV shows] attractive.
more
Source: NPR’s Marketplace
3/1/2013
The Copyright Alert System is a collaborative effort to curb online piracy and promote the lawful use of digital music, movies and TV shows. Professor Jonathan Zittrain, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, explains aspects of the system. Below are a few excerpts.
It [the Copyright Alert System] would make sharing one’s Internet connection a much dicier proposition because, to the extent that one is sharing it with a circle of people and you don’t know who everybody is, you can imagine these alerts starting to come up all the time and having to complete the re-education again and again, and it’s the kind of thing that could have an impact on that kind of sharing, either within a household or within a community where there are various forms of access sharing.
If you get a copyright alert and you say “How dare you, I’m a perfectly upstanding citizen and I’ve never done any such thing”, there’s a whole process to go to request a review. I’m not sure exactly what you would say, except I didn’t do it. It is ideally supposed to go to an independent reviewer and you pay a filing fee of 35 dollars. Now, for people whose Internet access may cost 35 dollars a month, that’s a lot to ask for a review of an accusation that has simply emerged on a pop-up box on one’s screen, and I’m not sure how well this will do it.
more
Source: The New York Times
2/28/2013
Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom joined The New York Times series of articles debating telecommuting. Below are a few excerpts from his article.
In my [telecommute] experiment, home workers produced 13 percent more, while working 9.5 percent more hours by reducing commuting and sick leave.
Home workers were happier. A lot happier. Rates of workers quitting dropped by half.
Financially, the experiment was also a success for the company. By saving office space, reducing attrition and increasing productivity, CTrip saved $2,000 per employee per year.
But working from home is not for everyone. Only 50 percent of employees volunteered, and many changed their minds after a few months. They complained of loneliness and the reduced chance for promotions.
more
Source: NPR’s All Things Considered
2/27/2013
This story discusses the new Copyright Alert System; it’s a collaborative effort to curb online piracy and promote the lawful use of digital music, movies and TV shows. Professor James Grimmelmann, New York University, explains aspects of the system. Below are a few excerpts.
Regarding Privacy Concerns
So one of the concerns has to do with due process, that there's just this list of IP addresses and it comes with the presumption that person who was targeted actually was doing something illegal. But there's a concern about misidentification. There's a concern that some of these uses might be fair uses and legal. There is a concern that it might be just somebody else was using my wireless network and it wasn't me at all.
Entertainment Industry’s Efforts to Educate or Crackdown?
This is an alternative to the crackdown they tried that didn't work so well. And they are hoping that an educational campaign will help. I don't think education about copyright will do that much, but the sense of you are being watched might.
more
Source: Wall Street Journal
2/27/2013
The article examines work-from-home arrangements and the effect on career advancement. Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom shares his findings from his recent telecommute experiment.
"Home workers can become forgotten workers," especially when it comes to bonding with senior management, said Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford and a co-author of the study. Being an engaging presence in meetings and dealing with work conflicts are key skills for getting ahead, he added.
more
Source: Ars Technica
2/26/2013
The article reports on a recent TED debate on progress. Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, participated in the live debate.
Growth is not dead.
Today, productivity is at an all time high. Worldwide incomes are growing faster than ever in history, and that’s not even the whole picture. Many of the gains we are making are hard to measure. Minds, brains, and knowledge are huge benefactors of recent progress, but it's difficult, if not impossible, to measure that.
The most important invention is machine learning. The full implications of the new machine age will take a century to play out. And it’s hard not to see those implications powering growth.
But problems lie ahead, Brynjolfsson conceded. Productivity is growing, but productivity is separating from employment, he said. Wealth is separating from work.
more
Source: Forbes
2/26/2013
The article reports on a recent TED debate on progress. Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, participated in the live debate.
We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
Brynjolfsson said productivity grew faster in the 2001-2010 period than it did in the prior decade, same before that and before that. The new machine age is more about knowledge creation: brains not brawn, ideas not things.
Brynjolfsson said machines are not here to mimic us, they are best used to do things differently than the way humans solve problems. It’s complementary.
more
Source: The New York Times
2/22/2013
Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University School of Law, comments on death and legacy of Alan F. Westin, a legal scholar who defined the modern right to privacy before the web era.
“He [Alan F. Westin] transformed the privacy debate by defining privacy as the ability to control how much about ourselves we reveal to others.”
“He insisted on a balance between the competing demands of privacy, disclosure and surveillance,” Mr. Rosen said.
“He recognized that the problems of protecting privacy are now so daunting that they can’t be dealt with by law alone, but require a mix of legal, social and technological solutions,” Mr. Rosen said.
more
Source: The Atlantic
2/15/2013
In this article about the costs of abandoning social media to ensure one's privacy, law professor Daniel Solove and his book, Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security, are quoted.
Daniel Solove, the John Marshall Harlan Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School, gets at the problem of scale in Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security when he takes the issue to its absurd conclusion in discussing the limited protection of the Fourth Amendment, which also has limited applicability to information shared with others:
“So don't use a credit card. Don't have cable. Don't use the Internet. Don't use the phone. Don't have a bank account. Don't go to the hospital. Don't have a job. Don't rent an apartment. Don't subscribe to any magazine or newspapers. Don't do anything that creates a record. In other words, go live like a hermit in a mountain or cabin.”
more
Source: NPR’s Planet Money
2/15/2013
Giovanni Peri, professor of economics at the University of California, Davis, shares his proposal for immigration reform with the hosts of Planet Money.
There are currently more than 30 categories of temporary visas with an incredible detail of who can come in on each. There is one specifically for fashion models.
Professor Peri’s proposal for temporary visas is to auction visas off to the highest bidder. Having two categories of visas – one for high-skilled workers and one for low-skilled workers – each with separate auctions, would allow each category to find the right price for their workers.
Whichever employer is willing to pay more is going to get the permit to hire the worker. The allocation of this worker is not determined by the government through some numbers that they come up with, but is determined by the market.
more
Source: The New York Times
2/14/2013
The article discusses the pro and con reactions to the President’s Executive Order on cybersecurity that he presented in the State of the Union address. Professor Daniel Solove, internationally-known expert in privacy law, offers his thoughts.
Meanwhile, the debate over privacy and security continues to be stuck in what Daniel J. Solove, a law professor at George Washington University, calls a false trade-off. In his 2011 book “Nothing to Hide: The False Trade-Off Between Privacy and Security,” Mr. Solove argues that Americans in the post-Sept. 11 era have been increasingly persuaded to trade “privacy” for “security,” with technology including video surveillance cameras, wiretapping and all kinds of digital data mining. “Privacy often loses out to security when it shouldn’t,” he writes.
The issue should not be seen, he adds, as a zero-sum game. “Privacy often can be protected without undue cost to security,” he continues. “In instances when adequate compromises can’t be achieved, the trade-off can be made in a manner that is fair to both sides. We can reach a better balance between privacy and security. We must. There is too much at stake to fail.”
more
Source: The New York Times
2/12/2013
One of the arguments against immigration reform is based on an assumption that undocumented workers undercut wages and take jobs that would otherwise go to Americans. This article examines the economic and productivity impact of undocumented workers in America’s workforce. Economics professor Giovanni Peri explains that undocumented workers actually help to increase skilled workers’ wages and thus increase businesses’ productivity.
Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis, has written a series of influential papers comparing the labor markets in states with high immigration levels to those with low ones. He concluded that undocumented workers do not compete with skilled laborers — instead, they complement them. In states with more undocumented immigrants, Peri said, skilled workers made more money and worked more hours; the economy’s productivity grew. From 1990 to 2007, undocumented workers increased legal workers’ pay in complementary jobs by up to 10 percent.
more
Source: The Wall Street Journal
2/12/2013
Economics professor Giovanni Peri, University of California, Davis, wrote this opinion piece in favor of immigration reform that legally accommodates new immigrants. He shows that large economic gains are achievable if the immigration system is reorganized following three fundamental principles. Below are a few excerpts from his article.
From 1990-2010, scientists and engineers admitted by the H-1B visa program added $615 billion to the economy.
Immigration is a powerful engine for bringing skills, workers and ideas into the United States. Yet if history is any guide, this country gets a chance at substantial immigration reform only every four to five decades. Thus the economic gains from "getting the immigration system right" will be large and long-lasting.
First fundamental principle: simplification. Have the government set overall targets and simple rules for temporary and permanent working permits, deciding the balance between permits in "skilled" and "unskilled" jobs.
Second principle: number of temporary visas should respond to labor demand. He proposes that temporary permits to hire immigrants should be made tradable and sold by the government in auctions to employers.
Third principle: scientists, engineers and innovators are the main drivers of productivity and of economic growth. More scientists and more innovation in the U.S. mean more labs, universities and companies doing research and creating jobs for Americans too.
more
Source: Wired
2/3/2013
The article examines children’s use of social media. danah boyd, Senior Researcher with Microsoft Research, Research Assistant Professor with New York University, and Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School, shared her expertise from years of studying youth online safety.
No matter what age is chosen,” argues Microsoft researcher danah boyd, “there’s not a magical event that happens on that birthday that makes the child suddenly older and more mature.”
“Protecting privacy is about making certain that people have the ability to make informed decisions about how they engage in public,” boyd told the panel. “That said, I am opposed to approaches that protect people by disempowering them.”
“Age segregation isn’t what parents want,” argues boyd. “Kids use sites like Facebook to talk with mentors and uncles and aunts and youth ministers and other valuable adults in their lives. That’s really important.”
“Parents know their children,” says boyd. “They make different decisions for different children. Giving parents guidance is extremely important, but creating restrictions based on age does little to help parents choose what’s right for their own household. I don’t think that it’s appropriate to focus on age at all.”
more
Source: National Public Radio’s Morning Edition
1/28/2013
The story discusses Google’s recent disclosure about the companies policies for meeting requests from government agencies for access to Google customer content, such as voice mail and email. Chris Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology's information privacy programs, is quoted.
"Most companies are very secretive about civil and law enforcement requests for user data," says Chris Hoofnagle, who specializes in privacy issues at Berkeley Law. He says companies usually prefer to preserve some wiggle room on how they respond to law enforcement.
"Google is going out on a limb here because, by making these statements, they might be creating customer expectations that certain process will be followed when their data is revealed to law enforcement," Hoofnagle says.
more
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
1/25/2013
Professor Pamela Samuelson, University of California, Berkeley School of Law, wrote this article to examine Aaron Swartz’ efforts to use the Internet to provide more opportunities for access to knowledge.
There was a time when access to knowledge was promoted through grants of copyrights to authors who typically transferred them to publishers. Now copyright has become the single most serious impediment to access to knowledge. Academic authors, among others, should use the Internet as a medium through which access to knowledge can be greatly expanded.
more
Source: Ars Technica
1/16/2013
This article examines proposed changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in the wake of Aaron Swartz’ suicide. Swartz was facing felony hacking charges that could have led to as much as 35 years in prison. Professor Lawrence Lessig, Harvard University School of Law, is quoted from his posts on reddit.
The language was praised by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, a friend of Swartz whose wife organized his legal defense fund. "This is a CRITICALLY important change that would do incredible good," Lessig wrote on reddit. "The CFAA was the hook for the government's bullying of @aaronsw. This law would remove that hook."
more
Source: The Globalist
1/14/2013
Columbia Law School professor Anu Bradford argues that while the European continent may be perceived to be weak militarily and declining in economic power, it is a giant in the field of world commerce.
By virtue of being the world's largest trading block, the EU can essentially dictate the rules and regulations for products that are traded.
Few Americans are aware that EU regulations determine the cosmetics they apply in the morning, the cereal they eat for breakfast, the software they use on their computer, as well as the privacy settings they adjust on their Facebook page. And that's just before 8:30 a.m.
Over the years, rules and regulations promulgated in the European Union have penetrated many aspects of economic life, both within Europe and outside. Brussels has pursued a process of "unilateral regulatory globalization." This is what I call "the Brussels Effect."
more
Source: The New York Times
1/13/2013
Daniel Solove and his book, Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security, are quoted in Bill Keller's op-ed about the number of ways American citizens’ privacy is accessed.
“The Obama administration’s position on privacy is basically ‘Trust us, we’re good guys,’ ” said Daniel Solove of George Washington University, whose book “Nothing to Hide” challenges the myth that law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from government snooping. “That’s exactly what Bush said. And it’s also the same thing that any despot says. We shouldn’t have to trust.”
Rigorous, independent oversight, he added, not only protects against abuses but also helps assure that what we do in the name of security actually works.
more
Source: Reuters
1/8/2013
The article examines Apple’s attempt to overturn a U.S. appeals court ruling against its request to impose a sales ban on Samsung's Galaxy Nexus smartphone until their patent trial, which is set for March 2014. Law professor R. Polk Wagner, University of Pennsylvania, is quoted.
It will be hard to convince the Federal Circuit to revisit the injunction issue because the legal arguments involved are not among those that have caused the most recent controversy at the court, said R. Polk Wagner, a professor at University of Pennsylvania Law School and a former Federal Circuit clerk.
However, the Supreme Court has made it more difficult for patent plaintiffs to secure sales injunctions in recent years, suggesting it would be unlikely to review this case, said Wagner, of the University of Pennsylvania.
"If they don't get it now," he said of Apple's petition for en banc review, "any chance they have won't come again for a long time."
more
Source: The New York Times
1/6/2013
Article discusses massive open online courses, or MOOCs, and the efforts to determine a revenue stream. Professor James Grimmelmann, New York Law School, is quoted.
“No one’s got the model that’s going to work yet,” said James Grimmelmann, a New York Law School professor who specializes in computer and Internet law. “I expect all the current ventures to fail, because the expectations are too high. People think something will catch on like wildfire. But more likely, it’s maybe a decade later that somebody figures out how to do it and make money.”
more
Source: The Boston Globe
1/5/2013
The article looks at Google’s business practices in light of the ending of the Federal Trade Commission closing its investigation against the search engine giant. Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University, is quoted.
“There’s never been any evidence that consumers were harmed by Google’s practices and no evidence that Google ever engaged in any manipulation that violates antitrust law,’’ said Eric Goldman, professor of law and director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law.
more
Source: The Wall Street Journal
1/4/2013
Article discusses the first ever Census Bureau study on American Management Practices. Nicholas Bloom, Stanford University, is one of the authors of the report.
“You have the Steve Jobs school of management on one side—very free-flowing, creative and non-structured, and the Jack Welch school on the other side, with lots of structured performance monitoring and targets,” Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom explains. “On average, the latter works. Jobs is clearly brilliantly successful, and Apple is an iconic Silicon Valley firm, but his style and firm appears to be an outlier that most successful manufacturing firms are not copying.”
“It looks like the IT revolution is rapidly changing the way U.S. firms are run,” Bloom says.
more
Source: Dissent Magazine
1/4/2013
Seton Hall University law professor Frank Pasquale and University of Virginia law and media professor Siva Vaidhyanathan are quoted from their Dissent article, “Borking Antitrust: Google Secures Its Monopoly,” in which they examine the principal components that informed the FTC’s decisions to end its investigation of Google.
Without strong action, centrifugal tendencies will increasingly dominate the internet, as innovation will centralize in the few mega-firms capable of promoting new services on an ever-less-level playing field.
more
Source: The New York Times
1/3/2013
The article looks at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announcement that it has closed its investigation into Google for anticompetitive search practices. Kevin Werbach, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, and Tim Wu, Columbia University School of Law, are quoted.
“Google had the Microsoft case as a template,” said Kevin Werbach, an associate professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Google just had to convince the regulators it was sufficiently different from Microsoft.”
Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia who was a senior adviser to the F.T.C. until last summer, said the outcome of the Google case reflected a change in thinking about antitrust enforcement. “It used to be like the way we dealt with the mob,” said Mr. Wu, who was involved in the agency’s Google inquiry but who emphasized that he was not speaking for the F.T.C.
more
Source: The Washington Post
1/3/2013
The article examines the challenges of regulatory offices to determine standards for consumer harm in light of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) announcement that it has closed its investigation into Google for anticompetitive search practices. William Kovacic, Director of the Competition Law Center and Professor of Law, George Washington University, is quoted.
“It has been the single issue that the antitrust system has had trouble dealing with since 1890,” said George Washington University law professor William Kovacic, a former FTC chairman. “That’s because the consumer impacts typically are mixed.”
more
Source: Financial Chronicle
12/31/2012
This article discusses the value to come from utilizing Big Data. Erik Brynjolfsson, Director, MIT Center for Digital Business and Professor at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is quoted as he discusses an article he co-wrote with Andrew McAfee, “Big Data: The Management Revolution” (Harvard Business Review, October 2012).
“Big Data,” said professor Brynjolfsson, will “replace ideas, paradigms, organistions and ways of thinking about the world.”
more
Source: The New York Times
11/28/2012
The article discusses the appointment of Professor Peter Swire to co-chairman of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Tracking Protection Working Group. Professor Swire’s primary focus will be to work out a global standard for “Do Not Track,” a computer browser setting that would allow Internet users to signal Web sites, advertising networks and data brokers that they did not want their browsing activities tracked for marketing purposes.
Peter P. Swire is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of privacy, computer security, and the law of cyberspace, and a former White House privacy official during the Clinton administration.
Mr. Swire, a former chief counselor for privacy at the Office of Management and Budget, said he hoped to strike a balance that was palatable to both sides. He said he viewed a Do Not Track system as a kind of digital equivalent to the Do Not Call list, a national registry in the United States through which consumers may opt out of phone solicitations.
“People can choose not to have telemarketers call them during dinner. The simple idea is that users should have a choice over how their Internet browsing works as well,” Mr. Swire said in a phone interview. But he added: “The overarching theme is how to give users choice about their Internet experience while also funding a useful Internet.”
“Do Not Track is a work in progress,” Mr. Swire said. “So is the Internet.”
more
Source: The Wall Street Journal
11/27/2012
The article reports on the appointment of Professor Peter Swire to co-chairman of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Tracking Protection Working Group as an attempt to salvage contentious negotiations between privacy advocates and the online advertising industry over how to block unwanted online tracking.
Peter P. Swire is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of privacy, computer security, and the law of cyberspace, and a former White House privacy official during the Clinton administration.
For his part, Mr. Swire held out hope. He said his goal is to promote a deal that would “foster an Internet that users can trust.” However, he conceded that the group is unlikely to meet its goal of completing work by the end of this year. “We’re starting immediately and working intensively during the next couple months,” Mr. Swire said.
more
Source: The Economist
11/24/2012
The article highlights a small group of the world’s top microeconomists who are working for big technology firms and are changing the way business decisions are made and markets work. Susan Athey, professor of economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Chief Economist at Microsoft, is highlighted.
The desire to use theory to challenge conventional thinking is one reason economists are valuable to firms, says Susan Athey, of Stanford University and Microsoft. When Ms Athey arrived at the software giant in 2007 it faced what was seen as an unavoidable trade-off: online advertising was good for revenues, but too much would deter users. If advertisers gained, users would lose. But economic theory challenges this, showing that if firms are dealing with two groups (advertisers and users, say), making one better off often benefits the other too.
Ms Athey and Microsoft’s computer scientists put that theory to work. One idea was to toughen the algorithm that determines whether an ad is shown. This means ads are displayed fewer times, so advertisers lose out in the short-term. But in the longer run, other forces come into play. More relevant ads improve the user experience, so user numbers rise. And better-targeted ads mean more users click on the advert, even if it is shown less often. Empirical evidence showed that although advertisers would respond only after some time, the eventual gain was worth the wait. Microsoft made the change.
more
Source: Morningstar
11/23/2012
This article examines China’s slowing economy. Daron Acemoglu’s recent book, Why Nations Fail is referenced.
MIT professor Daron Acemoglu and Harvard professor James Robinson persuasively argue in their book Why Nations Fail that sustainable growth comes from inclusive political and economic institutions. By political inclusiveness, they mean many people can influence the political process, keeping elites from thoroughly looting the rest of society. By economic inclusiveness, they mean the existence of rule of law, private property, protection for intellectual property, and free labor and capital markets. Extractive institutions, on the other hand, concentrate political and economic power in the hands of a few, who inevitably end up stifling growth.
more
Source: The New York Times
11/17/2012
The article looks at Rubicon, a tech company, that has developed an automated ad sales systems for Web sites. The Web Privacy Census, a report by Chris Hoofnagle and Nathan Good of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, is cited.
Among the trackers setting the most cookies on the top 1,000 Web sites in the United States, for example, BlueKai was first, with 2,562 cookies, while Rubicon came in second, with 2,470, according to research conducted last month by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.
more
Source: Wired
11/16/2012
This article, written by law professor John Duffy, University of Virginia School of Law, explains the issues with the “non-obviousness requirement” in the U.S. patent system, and proposes an elegant solution. Below are a few excerpts.
Patents are supposed to create incentives so that people research, develop, and disclose to the public technologies that the public would otherwise not have.
So let’s forsake passions, politics, and predispositions. Instead, let’s think like good engineers: Embrace an elegant solution that can get rid of all patents, except the ones we need!
Professor Duffy’s solution to “kludgy” patents is explained in a paper he co-wrote with Michael Abramowicz, “The Inducement Standard of Patentability.”
more
Source: The New York Times
11/12/2012
Article discusses the findings from the Web Privacy Census, a report co-authored by Chris Hoofnagle and Nathan Good of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Chris Hoofnagle, the director of information privacy programs at the Berkeley center and co-author of the study, said he hoped the data would set a baseline, providing all sides in the debate with empirical information as to the optimum method to regulate tracking.
“I’m hoping that it will inform which approach is the best,” Mr. Hoofnagle said. “We are not going to be well-served unless we measure these trends more rigorously.”
more
Source: The Wall Street Journal
11/11/2012
The article outlines a long-running lawsuit between Microsoft and Motorola Mobility over how much a patent holder can charge for technology considered part of an industry standard. Law Professor Mark Lemley, Stanford University, is quoted.
"We may for the first time ever," said Stanford Law School's Mark Lemley, "get a judge to decide the fundamental question of what a RAND patent license is worth."
more
Source: The Wall Street Journal
11/11/2012
Robert Barr, executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and frequent speaker on patent reform, is quoted in this article that looks at the lawsuit between Microsoft and Motorola Mobility. At issue is how much a patent holder can charge for technology considered to be part of an industry standard.
"Not just the parties, but all the companies who negotiate these things need the guidance," said Robert Barr, of the UC Berkeley School of Law and director of its center for law and technology.
more
Source: The Seattle Times
11/11/2012
This article examines the pivotal patent case between Microsoft and Motorola Mobility. A federal judge will rule for the first time on what a reasonable royalty rate is for patents deemed essential for certain technologies that have become industry standards. Robert Barr, executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and frequent speaker on patent reform, is quoted.
Furthermore, said Robert Barr, executive director of the University of California Berkeley's Center for Law and Technology, the judge's decision will likely "provide guidelines for how other companies negotiate FRAND licenses in the future, hopefully making it less necessary to go to court for a resolution."
more
Source: The Seattle Times
11/4/2012
The article discusses the Seattle Police Department's plan to use drone aircraft and the concern by some over a resulting loss of privacy. Law professor Ryan Calo, University of Washington, is quoted.
"How can they (law enforcement) shepherd us into an age when we have drones if they don't deal with people's privacy fears?" said Ryan Calo, a faculty member at the University of Washington School of Law who has written on the issue of drones and privacy.
Calo said that while drones do not provide more "opportunity for mischief" or misuse than, say, fusion centers where data is collected and shared, they do provoke more fear.
"We associate drones with the theater of war, and we can picture the inscrutable robot flying over the city," Calo said. "It's very evocative, and it could provide a real window for us to examine the balance between personal privacy and emerging technology."
Calo, in a phone interview, said the best protections for people would come from legislation at all levels of government. He said Congress should pass laws that direct the FAA to require applicants to say precisely how the drones will be used. In cases where there is a violation, "the FAA could hold them accountable by yanking their license," he said.
more
Source: Nightly Business Report
10/15/2012
The story examines the findings in a study by Stanford economics professor Nick Bloom and his colleagues that asks the question, “Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment.”
What many employers would like to know, says Bloom, is whether more flexibility in working arrangements would hurt or help the company’s profitability and competitiveness. In a new study with three colleagues, he found solid evidence at one company that allowing workers to work from home produced a large productivity boost as well as happier workers.
There are many potential implications from this experiment, say Bloom and Roberts. By positioning the company to roll out remote working to far-flung regional offices, the experiment shows how the advent of mobile computing might lead to more regional income equality and less pollution and traffic in crowded cities, as well as better family and community life.
more
Source: The New York Times
10/15/2012
This article examines a hypothesis put forward by Robert J. Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, that the American economy is running on empty. Daron Acemoglu was contacted to provide a response to this theory.
Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T and co-author of the book “
Why Nations Fail:
Origins of Power, Poverty and Prosperity,” wrote in response to an email I sent him asking about Gordon’s hypothesis:
“Bob has been a good corrective to people who think that the innovations of today are transforming the world in a way that those of yesteryear never did. This is a very important corrective. But I think he misses the major engine of innovation: the market tends to find whatever is profitable, even if we cannot see what that is today.”
more
Source: The Wall Street Journal
10/12/2012
The article examines Facebook’s privacy settings, and shows that users are often unaware of the extent to which their information is available. Alessandro Acquisti, Associate Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, is quoted.
Privacy researchers say that increasing privacy settings may actually produce what they call an "illusion of control" for social-network users. In a series of experiments in 2010, Carnegie Mellon University Associate Professor Alessandro Acquisti found that offering people more privacy settings generated "some form of overconfidence that, paradoxically, makes people overshare more," he says.
more
Source: Bloomberg Businessweek
10/11/2012
Article discusses a report released by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues that states many U.S. states lack laws to protect people from harmful use of their whole DNA transcripts, or genomes.
Pennsylvania Law School Professor Anita Allen, is a member of this panel. Her comments refer to discussion of existing federal laws, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, and the Common Rule that protects research subjects, which offer some protections against unauthorized use of medical data.
Rewriting those rules might ensure that patients have some needed protections, said Anita Allen, a University of Pennsylvania law professor and a member of the commission.
Such a reform “might be a very useful thing to do,” and is likely to be taken up by Congress, Allen said.
more
Source: Publishers Weekly
10/11/2012
Article looks at the ruling of the copyright infringement suit brought by the Authors Guild against HathiTrust, a digital preservation effort created by a collective of research libraries. The Guild alleges it was built with millions of “unauthorized” scans created by Google; and also argued that the program’s mass digitization was unprecedented under fair use. New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann is quoted.
“It’s becoming well-established copyright law that the ordinary operations of a search engine don't infringe,” Grimmelmann said, adding that [Judge] Baer's opinion extends that in two ways. “First, he takes it from digital media to analog. The fact that the books were being digitized for the first time didn’t faze him. And second, he draws on the Digital Humanities amici's argument that the non-consumptive research uses of a digital corpus, such as new kinds of analyses based on text mining, don't hurt the market for books. That's a big win for everyone looking to digitize books and do unexpected things with them.”
more
Source: The Atlantic
10/10/2012
This article looks at expectations of privacy given the use of drones. The author questioned whether he was trespassing when he sent a remote-controlled quadcopter with an HD camera attached flying over the fence into his neighbor’s “air space.” Ryan Calo, law professor at the University of Washington and affiliate scholar at Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, is quoted.
"Once upon a time, you had the rights to your property under the soil and to the sky. It went by the colorful, Latin label "ad coelum et ad inferos"---to the heavens and hell," Stanford Ryan Calo told me. "But subsequent case law recognized the limits imposed by commercial aviation and other realities of the modern world. Now you own the air and soil rights you might reasonably use and enjoy."
more
Source: BBC
10/10/2012
Article examines President Barack Obama’s social media campaign. The research conducted by Professor Joseph Turow, University of Pennsylvania, shows the majority of internet-using adults surveyed do not want to receive political messages tailored for them.
"The findings represent a national statement of concern," said Prof Joseph Turow, lead researcher on the study. "We have a major attitudinal tug of war - the public's emphatic and broad rejection of tailored political ads pulling against political campaigns' growing adoption of tailored political advertising without disclosing when they are using individuals' information and how.
more
Source: The New York Times “Room for Debate”
10/10/2012
Tim Wu, Professor of Law, Columbia University, participated in The New York Times’ “Room for Debate” series on intellectual property and innovation. In his essay, “Bad Uses of Good Laws,” Professor Wu discusses his belief that software patents have been a failed experiment in innovation policy.
The story of intellectual property rights and innovation is one of a good idea gone way too far. I.P. law is usually a big success in the industries it began in. For copyright, that’s the book industry; for patent, pharmaceuticals, chemistry and mechanics. Great so far.
Then comes the overreach. Inspired by the success of I.P. concepts in one area, lawyers push the idea that it would be great everywhere, in larger doses. They’re like a chef who thinks that since his tartar sauce makes fish taste better, it’ll improve his pumpkin pie as well. It doesn’t.
more
Source: The New York Times “Room for Debate”
10/10/2012
Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor and the Chair of the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, participated in The New York Times’ “Room for Debate” series on intellectual property and innovation. In his essay, “When the Law Is Not Just for Oligarchs,” Professor Vaidhyanathan makes a distinction between intellectual property rights to encourage innovation versus IP rights that reward past victories.
Intellectual property law encourages innovation when we design and enforce it with a focus on future innovation, not a fixation on rewarding past victories. If Congress and the courts would adhere to that first principle, we could get reasonable laws that grant reasonable rights.
more
Source: Time
10/8/2012
The article looks at the settlement of a seven-year conflict between Google and five major publishers over the search giant’s book-scanning initiative. James Grimmelmann, New York Law School, is quoted.
“In the last few years, Google and the publishers have made their peace; this is just the treaty-signing ceremony,”
James Grimmelmann, a copyright expert at New York Law School who has closely followed the case,
wrote on his blog. “The publishers have embraced the digital transition in books; Google is now a player and partner in that ecosystem, rather than a dangerous disruptive presence.”
more
Source: The New York Times
10/7/2012
Article examines the current state of software patents in the mobile arena. James Bessen, Lecturer in Law at the Boston University School of Law and Fellow at the Berkman Center on Internet and Society at Harvard, is quoted.
“There are hundreds of ways to write the same computer program,” said James Bessen, a legal expert at Harvard. And so patent applications often try to encompass every potential aspect of a new technology. When such applications are approved, Mr. Bessen said, “the borders are fuzzy, so it’s really easy to accuse others of trespassing on your ideas.”
more
Source: The Washington Post
10/3/2012
The article looks at the trend of governments requesting Google to block some on online content, most specifically content on YouTube.
“The larger trend is worrisome,” said Harvard law professor
Jonathan Zittrain. “As content is moving onto particular platforms that are owned, it becomes easier [for government officials] to make those phone calls.”
more
Source: Research
10/1/2012
This article looks at the ‘game-changing’ insights big data is expected to bring over the next few years. A recent paper by danah boyd, Senior Researcher with Microsoft Research and Research Assistant Professor, New York University, is quoted.
In her paper
Six Provocations for Big Data (co-authored by Kate Crawford of the University of South Wales) Microsoft researcher
Danah Boyd spoke of “a problematic underlying ethos that bigger is better, that quantity necessarily means quality”. In reality, she says, “the size of data being sampled should fit the research question being asked: in some cases, small is best.”
more
Source: The Harvard Business Review Magazine
10/1/2012
This article, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, explains why digital data, also referred to as Big Data, is so important. Specifically, the authors discuss how big data can aid businesses in making informed and effective decisions. Erik Brynjolfsson is the Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, and Professor at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here are a few excerpts from the article.
(But) in fact the use of big data has the potential to transform traditional businesses as well. It may offer them even greater opportunities for competitive advantage (online businesses have always known that they were competing on how well they understood their data). … the big data of this revolution is far more powerful than the analytics that were used in the past. We can measure and therefore manage more precisely than ever before. We can make better predictions and smarter decisions. We can target more-effective interventions, and can do so in areas that so far have been dominated by gut and intuition rather than by data and rigor.
As the tools and philosophies of big data spread, they will change long-standing ideas about the value of experience, the nature of expertise, and the practice of management. Smart leaders across industries will see using big data for what it is: a management revolution.
As of 2012, about 2.5 exabytes of data are created each day, and that number is doubling every 40 months or so. More data cross the internet every second than were stored in the entire internet just 20 years ago. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes.
more
Source: The New York Times
9/21/2012
The article looks at facial recognition technology: both the ability for Facebook to identify users, as well as how the technology is used globally as surveillance cameras are increasingly installed in public spaces. Chris Hoofnagle, Director of Information Privacy Programs at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, is quoted.
“This is a big deal,” said Chris Hoofnagle, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in online privacy.
“The development of these tools in the private sector directly affects civil liberties,” he explained. “The ultimate application is going to be — can we apply these patterns in video surveillance to automatically identify people for security purposes and maybe for marketing purposes as well?”
more
Source: The Christian Science Monitor
9/16/2012
As the article title says, this piece explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing our lives. Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, is quoted.
"The AI revolution is doing to white-collar jobs what robotics did to blue-collar jobs," say Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, authors of the "Race Against the Machine."
more
Source: Ars Technica
9/16/2012
Princeton computer science professor Ed Felten recently returned to teaching after 20 months as the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) first Chief Technology Officer. Ars Technica interviewed Professor Felten and asked him “what’s it like to be a geek in the land of lawyers?” Below are a few excerpts.
Felten said it was sometimes a challenge helping policymakers understand the nature and limits of technology.
They [people in Washington] think that "any system can be broken, any system can be made secure, and it's just a matter of throwing resources at problems."
Indeed, he said that the importance of relationships to policymaking is one of the key things about Washington that's not widely understood in the technology world.
"Policymakers have all kinds of people telling them things all the time," he said. "Unless they have an understanding of how reliable your advice can be, they don't know how much weight to put on it." Developing that kind of relationship takes time. And such relationships must be a "two-way street," Felten told us.
more
Source: Inside Higher Ed
9/11/2012
This article examines a copyright lawsuit against Georgia State University by three academic publishers. This is an educational “fair use” case with the publishers alleging that Georgia State faculty were copying large portions of books from the publishers without permission and then making them available to students, for free, through the university’s e-reserve system. The U.S. District Court found largely in favor of Georgia State, striking down the publishers’ allegations of infringement. The publishers are appealing. Professor James Grimmelmann, New York Law School, is quoted.
“There’s very little downside to appealing,” says James Grimmelmann, a professor at New York Law School. “Yes, they risk establishing a precedent at a higher level, but the district court opinion was heavy and careful enough that it would have been a persuasive precedent anyway.”
In a best-case scenario for the publishers, according to Grimmelmann, an appellate judge might endorse a stricter cut-off for how much of a work a professor could lawfully copy before overstepping the boundaries of fair use.
more
Source: Wired
9/10/2012
This article, written by Chris Sprigman and Kal Raustiala, discusses intellectual property rights and competition. Below are a few excerpts.
Intellectual property (IP) rights in product designs can have powerful effects on competition. These cases highlight the pitfalls of IP rights in product designs that are too broad.
One way IP rights can harm both competition and innovation is by blocking the ability of competitors to refine and improve an existing design. Innovation is often glorified as being about the big “a-ha!” moment or breakthrough, but in many cases it is much more about tweaking a good idea and making it a great one.
Do we really think that without a patent on the iPhone’s shape, Apple wouldn’t innovate? And if women prefer their stilettos with red soles, is it right to give Christian Louboutin a monopoly that lasts forever (trademarks never expire) on that style of shoe? We know that doing so limits competition, which means consumers pay more… and what exactly do we gain in return?
Christopher Sprigman and Kal Raustiala are the authors of The Knockoff Economy.
more
Source: Financial Times
8/31/2012
This article references a study by Nicolas Bloom and his colleagues, James Liang, D. John Roberts and Zhichun Jenny Ying (Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Corporate Experiment) and examines the effects of telecommuting.
My eye was caught, then, by a new study conducted by Nicholas Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts and Zhichun Jenny Ying, all economists at Stanford University.
Liang simply didn’t know whether introducing telecommuting would work well. So, with Bloom and colleagues monitoring the results, Ctrip introduced a carefully designed randomised trial. From a pool of 255 qualified volunteers, Ctrip used birthdays – odd or even – to assign about half to nine months of home working and half to continuing to work from the office. The telecommuting was a big success.
more
Source: Ars technica
8/30/2012
This article, written by Professor James Grimmelmann of New York Law School, examines how copyright law treats broadcasting and streaming. Below are a few excerpts.
Since streaming became practical in the 1990s, a series of adventuresome dot-com entrepreneurs have been searching for a way to repeat the cable systems' original legal coup, bringing live TV to Joe User—preferably without paying to do so. (It's hard to make a living by streaming video when copyright owners can always turn around and grab back your profits by demanding higher licensing fees. Exhibit 1:
Netflix. Exhibit B:
Hulu.)
Perhaps we can think about the problem of copyright on the Internet another way. Instead of asking which back-end technologies are legal, it might make more sense to ask what it is legal for users to do with computers on the front end. This approach would let people spend less time worrying about the exact definitions of "reproduction" and "performance" and more time thinking about users' rights, especially under fair use.
Copyrighted content is the nuclear fuel of the Internet. It powers high-energy innovation, but can cause catastrophic legal meltdown if mishandled. Prolonged exposure has been scientifically proven to cause business-model mutations.
more
Source: The Los Angeles Times
8/28/2012
This article looks at Google’s purchase of Motorola Mobility, and the patents that came with it, in light of the recent decision handed down on the Apple v. Samsung patent infringement lawsuit. Professor Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law, is quoted.
"In theory, the Motorola patents do matter because they give Google some leverage against Apple," UCLA law professor Douglas Lichtman said. But even so, he said, it's "not an even fight."
"Motorola was not Apple's complete peer before its acquisition, and so owning Motorola does not make Google a complete peer today," Lichtman said.
more
Source: American Public Media’s Marketplace
8/27/2012
This article looks at the verdict in the Apple v. Samsung patent infringement trial. Professor Mark Lemley, Stanford Law School, is quoted.
Mark Lemley: The one patent that the jury rejected in what was otherwise a sweeping win for Apple was the simplest and I think the most problematic one and that was the shape of the rectangle for the tablet with rounded corners. Now, the jury didn't say that patent was invalid, they didn't invalidate any of the patents, but they did say that Samsung didn't infringe it. I think that's a way of avoiding a problematic ruling that said nobody could use rectangles for their tablets.
Lemley: If you came up with something that looks different than anybody had done before, classic example is the traditional shape of the glass Coca-Cola bottle, you could have a patent on that not because it was inventive, but because it was new and different ornamentation and we wanted you to be able to prevent other people from imitating it.
Lemley: There's an entire applications ecosystem out there that's written hundreds of thousands of programs on the assumption that these features are built into the operating system of the smartphone. So, anybody who's software allows you to pinch to expand or contract or bounce back on the screen on a list or tap to center, Samsung now has to worry not just about its own operating system, but whether the apps that it's already sold are going to be compatible with the redesign system.
more
Source: ABC News
8/27/2012
This story discusses the impact of the Apple v Samsung patent infringement case on the mobile phone industry. Professor Mark Lemley, Stanford University, is quoted.
"I think Apple's ultimate target is not just Samsung but the Android ecosystem. They view Google as their ultimate competitor, this is a setback for all of Android," Mark Lemley, a law professor at Stanford University, told ABC News.
…Lemley believes Apple will attempt to go after those newer handsets in the injunction. "Is it limited just to these products or does it prevent Samsung from implementing it into other products?" Lemley said.
more
Source: The Register-Guard
8/26/2012
The article details the experiences of a young woman who is the victim of “synthetic” identity theft; that is the theft and use of a Social Security number. Chris Hoofnagle, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, provides his expertise on what Hoofnagle says is “the fastest growing white-collar crime in the country.”
“All businesses have some level of fraud (perpetrated against them), and it is inefficient to attempt to completely eliminate it,” he said. In the case of identity theft, creditors simply pass off the costs to merchants and consumers, he said.
“Consumers are not customers to CRAs (credit reporting agencies), businesses are. Businesses prefer to have more information, even if some of that information is incorrect, than to have less,” he said. “Consumers have no way to opt out of the credit reporting system or to otherwise influence how these firms operate.”
more
Source: Wall Street Journal
8/26/2012
This article examines Apple’s landmark victory over Samsung in the recent patent infringement lawsuit. Professor Mark Lemley, Stanford Law School, is quoted.
"All of that makes it pretty clear that at some level Samsung set out to imitate Apple's product," said Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School.
"Samsung's patents really looked like an afterthought," said Stanford Law's Mr. Lemley. "It also left the impression in the minds of the jurors that Samsung was on the defense."
more
Source: eTeknix
8/25/2012
This article reports on the news of the verdict of the Apple v. Samsung patent infringement case. On August 24, 2012, the jury decided in favor for Apple, granting them over $1.4 billion in damages from Samsung. Robert Barr, Executive Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, is quoted.
The amount of damages is extraordinary. A billion dollars in damages is extra. It’s one of the biggest patent verdicts ever. That’s a huge amount of damages. And the judge has to now decide whether to increase that for the wilfulness. And the judge could increase that as much as triple. The judge has to still decide if there will be an injunction against future sales or a recall of product.
more
Source: The New York Times
8/25/2012
This article reports on the news of the verdict of the Apple v. Samsung patent infringement case. August 25, 2012, the jury decided in favor for Apple, granting them over $1.4 billion in damages from Samsung. Professor Josh Lerner, Harvard Business School, and James Bessen, Boston University School of Law are quoted.
“It is hard not to see all the patent-buying and patent lawsuits as a distortion of the role of patents,” said Josh Lerner, an economist and patent expert at Harvard Business School. “They are supposed to be an incentive for innovation.”
“The smartphone patent battles are enabled by lots of trivial patents that never should have been granted in the first place,” said James E. Bessen, a patent expert and lecturer at the Boston University School of Law.
more
Source: The New York Times
8/24/2012
This article reports early reactions to the news that a jury awarded Apple over $1 billion in damages from Samsung in the landmark patent infringement trial. Mark Lemley, Stanford Law School, and Robert Barr, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, are quoted.
Mark Lemley, a professor of Stanford’s law school, spelled out
just how enormous a win this was on Twitter:
$1,051,855,000. And no cents, apparently. Just large enough to make it the largest surviving patent verdict in history.
Robert Barr, executive director of the Center for Law and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley, spelled out what this would mean for the tech industry as a whole:
Each of the patents cover a particular feature of the iPhone and the iPad. You can still make a smartphone, like the Microsoft Windows phone made by Nokia. It has a different look than the iPhone, different appearance and different features. That would be an example that is unaffected by this. The important thing here is that Apple’s patents were upheld as valid. Other companies are going to have to avoid the patents or license them.
more
Source: Mercury News
8/24/2012
This article quotes legal experts reacting to the verdict in the Apple v. Samsung patent infringement trial. Professor Mark Lemley, Stanford Law School, is quoted.
"The verdict will be hard to dislodge," said Stanford University law professor Mark Lemley. "It's clear the jury took their job very seriously."
more
Source: The New York Times
8/24/2012
This article discusses how the federal court jury’s decision in the smartphone patent lawsuit between Apple and Samsung is expected to alter the dynamics of the competitive mobile phone industry. Robert Merges and Robert Barr, both with Berkeley’s Center for Law and Technology, are quoted.
While Google is not involved in this case, Apple was clearly going after Android all along, said Robert P. Merges, professor of law and technology at University of California Berkeley School of Law. If other handset makers using Android fear that Apple will take them on and win, might they shy away from Android? “There are a lot more players in the Android world who could be involved in the future in litigation,” he said. “And it’s going to raise the cost of everyone in the Android system if the damages stick.”
Shifting to a less popular software system, like Windows or even Research in Motion’s operating system expected to arrive next year, gives Apple an advantage in the marketplace. “It’s not good news for Google,” Mr. Merges said. “Apple’s real target is the Android ecosystem, the Android world, everything having to do with Androids. That’s really what they are targeting here.”
Robert Barr, executive director of the University of California Berkeley’s Center for Law and Technology, said that the user interface — the icons and other features that users see and touch — of the Nokia Windows phones look distinctly different from the iPhone. Nokia, a longtime maker of phones, also has a thick portfolio of patents to protect itself.
more
Source: USA Today
8/24/2012
This article examines Apple’s landmark victory over Samsung in the recent patent infringement lawsuit. Professor Mark Lemley, Stanford Law School, is quoted.
The $1.05 billion in damages is the largest surviving verdict in patent history. Two larger verdicts were reversed, according to Stanford University law professor Mark Lemley.
"It's a huge win for Apple," says Lemley, who specializes in technology. "But this is one lawsuit among 50 in the smartphone market, and Apple's real target may be the Android ecosystem."
Apple's nearly clean sweep is likely to blunt momentum for Samsung — which recently passed Apple as the world's largest seller of smartphones — and will probably force it to redesign its mobile devices, Lemley says.
The bigger question is whether Apple's resounding victory "scares off" Google-Motorola and others in the smartphone wars, he says.
more
Source: Wall Street Journal
8/24/2012
This article examines the cost of the landmark patent infringement lawsuit between Apple and Samsung. Professor Mark Lemley, Stanford Law School, is quoted.
“My estimate for this trial is a half a billion total,” said intellectual property lawyer
Mark A. Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School and founding partner of the law firm Durie Tangri LLP.
Patent litigation is likely to remain a boon for lawyers. With tech companies duking it out over smartphones in some
50 lawsuits worldwide, “it wouldn’t surprise me if the smartphone companies have spent a billion in legal fees,”
Mr. Lemley said.
“We know they’ve spent $15 billion in the last two years buying patents… so the companies clearly think there is far more at stake than what they are paying their lawyers.”
more
Source: CNN
8/24/2012
This article reports on the verdict in the Apple v. Samsung patent infringement trial. Professor Mark Lemley, Stanford Law School, is quoted.
"This is a huge win for Apple," Mark Lemley, a Stanford law professor, said over e-mail. The award "is just large enough to make it the largest surviving patent verdict in history."
more
Source: Chicago Tribune
8/16/2012
The article looks into a recent federal appeals court ruling stating that the Copyright Royalty Board, a panel of administrative judges who set the rate broadcasters pay for copyright licenses, was unconstitutional because of the way its panelists are appointed and the job protections they are given. Intellectual property law professor, John Duffy of University of Virginia, is quoted.
"This issue has very broad implications on a lot of different agencies," said John Duffy, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.
"If the Copyright Royalty Board is unconstitutional, there might be a lot of adjudicators that are unconstitutional in the executive branch," he said.
The issue may end up before the U.S. Supreme Court in its upcoming term, Duffy said. "The D.C. Circuit declared a statute of Congress unconstitutional," he said. "Usually, that's the kind of case the Supreme Court will take."
more
Source: Popular Mechanics
8/15/2012
The article examines the ways a federal judge and a new congressional bill have each suggested to end the software patent wars. James Bessen and co-author Michael Meurer’s papers, “The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls” and “The Direct Costs from NPE Disputes,” are referenced and Mr. Bessen is quoted.
In fact, 85 percent of the technology companies sued by nonpracticing entities (the trolls) settle out of court, according to
a study released last year. That study, by
James Bessen and
Michael Meurer at Boston University School of Law, estimated that the trolls cost companies $500 billion in legal fees, settlements, awards, and hits to their share values between 1990 and 2010. This June, the duo released
another study arguing that defendants may have racked up to $29 billion in direct costs from trolls' lawsuits in 2011, and most of those companies were small or medium-size.
"I think the bill [
SHIELD Act] would help,"
Bessen tells PM. "Basically, this would prevent nuisance suits. There are a lot of suits out there where the lawyers are just trying to get the cases to settle for several hundred thousand dollars. Those cases would go away because the trolls would have more than that at stake if they lost."
Bessen says the real game changer would be Judge Posner's suggestion: Do away with software patents entirely as a surgical strike against both the trolls and the patent arms race among tech giants.
"Judge Posner is a highly respected judge and founder of the law in economics movement of analysis. So, for him to argue that patents themselves are not really necessary [is a big surprise],"
Bessen says. "It's a question I've been raising in my research—[but] not in such a blunt way. In the 1980s, we didn't have patents and it [technology] was a very innovative industry. What we've seemed to be adding is not more innovation but more litigation."
Bessen has another solution to the patent wars: Lawmakers should raise the fees that patent owners pay to keep their patents in force. With high enough renewal fees, companies would think carefully about which patents they want to keep and which they would let expire. High renewal fees would be like a tax on companies that rack up large amounts of litigation.
"It's like a pollution tax," he says. "Those patents pollute the environment, and you're discouraging that kind of pollution."
more
Source: Popular Mechanics
8/15/2012
The article examines the ways a federal judge and a new congressional bill have each suggested to end the software patent wars. Professor Mark Lemley’s recent paper, “Software Patents and the Return of Functional Claiming,” is referenced and Professor Lemley is quoted.
Mark Lemley, a technology legal expert and professor at Stanford Law School, says that while software patents are a pain, we cannot simply cancel them. "No one really knows what a software patent is, and there are real inventions out there in software, just as in any other field,
Lemley says. "The real problem is that software patents are too broad and too easy to get."
He says the debate turns on the legal definition of a software patent. Should it be defined by a set of categories, such as data processing and image analysis? Maybe, he says, but that doesn't distinguish code from hardware. So why not define it by key words, so that a software patent contains words like "software" and "computer," but not "antigen" and "semiconductor."
Lemley argues
in a new paper that the big problem is patent claims increasingly cover the goal of the software, not the specific code written to reach that goal. For example, there are patents for anything from online sales to video downloads, which are goals. But there are many ways to provide those services. So a patent should cover a specific means of, say, streaming a video, not the act of streaming itself,
Lemley says.
more
Source: Reuters
8/9/2012
The article discusses Starbucks use of a smartphone app to process customer payments. Chris Hoofnagle, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, is quoted.
"There are a number of problems there - from somebody stealing your device to the problem of the drive-by download," said Chris Hoofnagle, a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley Law School. "On the other hand, maybe presenting your name and face could reduce skimming risk - of somebody taking your card and copying the information."
more
Source: The Daily Beast, Newsweek
8/6/2012
In this article, Richard Epstein, New York University School of Law, examines Judge Richard Posner’s decision in the high-profile Apple v. Motorola case to dismiss the claims of both sides, as well as Posner’s general critique of the patent system. Below are a few excerpts from Professor Epstein’s article.
What is so striking about Posner’s criticism, however, is that he does not offer any concrete example of how the current patent system has wrought havoc on society. Moreover, he says nothing about the incredible success that a variety of pooling and licensing devices have had in spreading the use of patents through a wide range of standard-setting organizations.
More specifically, a natural selection device makes it more likely that the most important software innovations make it into the patent system. By any reckoning, patent prosecution—the fine art of getting a patent through the Patent and Trade Office—is not an easy endeavor. Indeed, it is one that on average has been made even more difficult with the passage of the misnamed and convoluted America Invents Act.
By putting the remedial cart before the liability horse, we have the odd situation that no one can find out anything about the strength of the patent or the potential range of damages. If that is done on a common basis, then we will have knocked out the entire patent system for software, without having the slightest idea of the relative strength of the Apple and Motorola contentions.
more
Source: The Guardian
8/3/2012
Article refers to Twitter’s stand to support users right to freedom of expression and the apparent conflict in its recent action of suspending Guy Adams’ account for a day. Jonathan Zittrain, Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, provides his insights.
Jonathan Zittrain, a specialist in internet law at Harvard, thinks the commercial pressures Twitter is now coming under are not dissimilar from the incentive a magazine might feel to pull articles that could upset a major advertiser. "It sounds like Twitter is trying to articulate, and enforce, the kinds of editorial separation that reputable magazines have long embraced."
Zittrain points out that the original building blocks of the internet – email, the web, newsgroups, relay chat – were all uncontrolled and "unowned", with no global administrator. Now they are being supplanted by controlled counterparts like Facebook messaging available only to Facebook subscribers, or Apps instead of websites.
"There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does give rise to risks of compromise and control," he says.
more
Source: Foreign Policy
8/1/2012
Daron Acemoglu and his “Why Nations Fail” co-author James A. Robinson wrote this piece in Foreign Policy to counter Mitt Romney’s controversial comments on the link between Israel’s economic success and its culture. Below are a few excerpts from their article.
Unfortunately, Romney's views are seriously out of sync with those of the great mass of social scientists. For one, as his more extended argument in the National Review illustrates, he confuses "culture" with institutions. By culture, social scientists mean people's values and beliefs. Romney refers to Americans' "work ethic," which is cultural, but he also claims that political and economic freedoms are the real keys to economic success. But political and economic freedom are not guaranteed by (or even related to) culture but by institutions, such as the U.S. Constitution or its system of property rights.
Leaving aside the case of Israel and Palestine, we show in Why Nations Fail that Romney's ideas about "freedom" are much closer to the right way to think about relative prosperity than his ones about "culture." Rich countries are those that have created inclusive political and economic institutions.
more
Source: Bloomberg Businessweek
8/1/2012
Article examines studies by the U.S. Federal Reserve and central banks of Israel, England, Italy, Spain, and Chile to see if keyword searches track trends in the economies. Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT, is quoted.
Greater foresight could make the difference between a slowdown and a recession, a recovery and an inflation- stoking boom, according to Erik Brynjolfsson, a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s Academic Advisory Council.
“When central bankers were looking at traditional data, they were essentially looking out the rear-view mirror,” said Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The December 2009 study he co-authored on predicting U.S. home sales using search volumes was cited by three of the central bank studies.
“If the Fed had had access to this information, they would have been able to make better forecasts of what was happening to the housing market and known more quickly the depth of the problem” during the 2007-2009 recession, he said.
more
Source: Politico
7/31/2012
Article looks into the state of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), a federal board tasked in the Senate’s cybersecurity bill with ensuring government agencies and tech companies don’t infringe on consumer privacy. The PCLOB has been dormant and understaffed for years. Professor Peter Swire, Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University, is quoted.
If the confirmations continue to be stalled, “We’ll have information sharing but not the oversight,” said Peter Swire, an Ohio State University professor who served as chief counselor for privacy in the Clinton administration. “Depending on the bill, we might repeal privacy protections and have nothing in place to make up for that.”
For one thing, the PCLOB can’t even staff itself, according to Swire, because the statute authorizing it says the chairman must perform those duties — and, well, there’s still no chairman.
more
Source: Bloomberg
7/30/2012
In Apple’s $2.5 billion patent-infringement lawsuit against Samsung, the jurors of this federal court case are the first to consider the global smartphone dispute. Professor Mark Lemley, Stanford University, comments on the sophistication of the jurors.
“Just as many people in the valley work for Android companies like Google as work for Apple,” Lemley said in an e- mail, referring to Google Inc.’s Android operating system that some Samsung products use. “I expect that a Silicon Valley jury will be more technologically sophisticated than most, and that may work in Samsung’s favor.”
more
Source: The Big Think
7/25/2012
This article asked of eight of the world’s top young economists about the future of economics. Professor Glen Weyl, University of Chicago, was one of the eight featured. He spoke about information technology and its effect on social organization. TAP scholar Nicholas Bloom was also featured. A few excerpts from Professor Weyl’s thoughts are provided here:
increasingly, information technology is leading individuals to delegate their most “private” decisions to automated processing systems. Choices of movies, one of the last realms of taste one would have guessed could be delegated to centralized expertise, are increasingly shaped by services like Netflix’s recommender system.
Information technology thus fundamentally challenges the standard foundations of the market economy.
more
Source: The Big Think
7/25/2012
This article asked of eight of the world’s top young economists about the future of economics. Professor Nicholas Bloom, Stanford University, was one of the eight featured. He spoke about policy uncertainty. TAP scholar Glen Weyl was also featured. A few excerpts from Professor Bloom’s thoughts are provided here:
Developed countries’ biggest question now is probably: how do we restart growth? … A big factor that politicians and the media are pushing heavily right now is that growth is getting crushed by how policy has induced uncertainty. Basically, firms and consumers in the U.S. and Europe are holding back from spending until they know what is going to happen with taxes, spending, and (to a lesser extent) regulations over the next year or so. In the U.S., we have the November 2012 election generating a massive cloud of policy uncertainty, and in Europe, a rolling wave of elections and collapsing governments.
I do not think that any one single breakthrough will happen. The progress is likely to be heavily empirical—simply because more and more data is becoming available, and it is easy to analyze with fast computers.
… economics has gone from Victorian science, where one genius in his shed could invent the steam engine over the weekend, to industrial science, where innovation comes in thousands of tiny steps made by dozens of research teams.
more
Source: CNET
7/13/2012
Article discusses the proliferation of Google products, and consumers’ use of them. Attitudes about privacy concerns are the focus. Chris Hoofnagle, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, is quoted.
Google's moral compass is steered to a large degree by its mantra of "don't be evil." "They believe their intentions are pure and therefore privacy problems are not a problem because they don't intend to harm people," said
Chris Hoofnagle, director of Information Privacy Programs at the
Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. But that kind of thinking can be dangerous because it doesn't factor in things like hackers who can steal data and governments who can force well-intentioned companies to hand over user information or comply with wiretap orders, or even economic realities that might compel a change in business strategy.
more
Source: Fortune
7/11/2012
With the racketeering conspiracy and criminal copyright infringement charges against Megaupload as a backdrop, this article examines copyright law and the bills and litigation attempts to stem the tide of piracy. Paul Goldstein, Stanford Law School, and Jane Ginsburg, Columbia Law School are quoted; and efforts by Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law School, to challenge extending copyright terms are referenced.
In academia today, says Paul Goldstein, a copyright scholar at Stanford Law School, "those who favor free use outnumber by at least an order of magnitude, probably a couple orders of magnitude, those of us who take a more [protective] view."
The most influential proselytizer for a freer approach has been Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig who filed a case challenging the constitutionality of a 1998 law that extended copyright terms by 20 years. In his constitutional challenge, Lessig argued that the law represented the entertainment industry's greedy attempt to extend copyright terms perpetually, in violation of the "limited terms" language of the Constitution. Though Lessig's argument lost before every judicial tribunal that heard it -- including the Supreme Court in 2003, by a 7-2 vote -- it was a thundering success in the court of public opinion.
"The attack on copyright term extension was a turning point," says Goldstein. "Copyright was demonized in a way that it had not been before. It was hard to find a car in Silicon Valley that didn't have a bumper sticker that read FREE MICKEY. I think it's really unfortunate."
"Infringers have long found eloquent, if somewhat cynical, ways to justify piracy in the name of progress," Columbia Law School professor Jane Ginsburg has written.
more
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
7/9/2012
Pamela Samuelson, law and information professor and faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, writes about the "dream of a comprehensive digital library accessible to the public," in this op-ed piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
It's no secret that copyright law needs a significant overhaul to adapt to today's complex information ecosystem. Unfortunately the near-term prospects for comprehensive reform are dim.
One of the key problems for digital libraries such as the DPLA [Digital Public Library of America] is the extraordinarily long terms of copyright today: 70 years past an author's death or 95 years from first publication for works made for hire. Had Congress not bowed to pressure from industries with a stake in copyright, especially Hollywood, to extend existing copyright terms several times in the past 40 years, all works published before 1956 would now be in the public domain and available for inclusion in the DPLA.
Copyright should be shorter in duration, more balanced, more comprehensible, and normatively closer to what members of the public think that it means or should mean.
Although we are not likely to get comprehensive reform anytime soon, perhaps we can persuade Congress to make some more modest reforms.
We know it is now possible for the cultural and scientific heritage of humankind to be made available through a universal digital library such as the DPLA. It would be a grievous mistake not to bring that future into being when it is so clearly within our grasp.
more
Source: America Public Media’s Marketplace
7/5/2012
Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard University, says our phones are basically two-way radios in his discussion with John Moe about mesh networks.
Zittrain: What if we could use those radios to talk to one another, and kind of like the way you pass beer at a Red Sox game, across the row from one person to another, we could get data moved that way too.
Zittrain: Most mesh networking implementations work better the more people there are the nearer to one another. And that can be where there is a lot of congestion. Everybody tries to make a phone call after there is a home run at that Red Sox game, and now nobody can because the network is overloaded. A mesh network would say, in theory, wow, all of those people together can communicate through one another and actually make a more robust network than if they were in the field of dreams, and no one else was around.
Mesh networks in a crisis:
Zittrain: If a tsunami should come through or a hurricane or some kind of attack, and the usual networks are down - you can't get a cell signal or you can't get broadband anymore the usual ways, we still all have our two-way radios.
Moe: So how do we use them in that scenario?
Zittrain: Suppose your phone had a copy of your Facebook credentials on it. And if trouble comes through, and there's no easy way to communicate, you either have a brick in your hand - it's just useless, or you can talk to other people near you, who in turn - their phone can talk to other phones near them, and you get this sort of local net going. And then you say, "are any of my Facebook friends nearby?" You could see that as being very useful in times of trouble - to communicate and to locate people who want help.
more
Source: San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate
7/1/2012
Article examines a $63 million ruling against eBay by a French commercial court that found the online auction site was liable for facilitating the sale of counterfeit luxury goods. Professor Mark Lemley, Stanford University, is quoted.
If the courts here adopt a rule that you should proactively keep bad things off the Internet, a business model like eBay's is just not possible," said Mark Lemley, an Internet law professor at Stanford University.
more
Source: CNN Money
6/26/2012
Article discusses the research study about the direct costs of NPE disputes by James Bessen and Michael Meurer of Boston University's School of Law.
Patent trolls last year cost defendants $29 billion in "direct costs", according to a
study by James Bessen and Michael Meurer of Boston University's School of Law. But that's only the beginning -- accounting just for legal fees and licensing.
"This figure does not include indirect costs to the defendants' businesses, such as diversion of resources, delays in new products, and loss of market share," the study asserts. Even so, the direct costs alone "effectively impose a significant tax on investment in innovation" the authors say.
The study determined that 1,150 companies defended themselves against 5,842 lawsuits last year. About half of those companies earned less than $100 million during the year, showing that "NPEs are not just a problem for large firms," according to the authors.
more
Source: Bloomberg
6/25/2012
Article discusses the research study about the direct costs of NPE disputes by James Bessen and Michael Meurer of Boston University's School of Law.
Companies with $1 billion or less in annual revenue were named in 59 percent of the claims filed last year. While large companies end up paying more in settlement and legal costs, the smaller companies’ expenses eat up a larger share of their revenue, according to the study by
James Bessen, a lecturer of law at BU, and
Michael Meurer, an economist and law professor at the university.
“I was surprised at the magnitude and how much of it is really hitting small companies,” said
Bessen. “It’s having a bigger effect on innovation than we had thought.”
Bessen and
Meurer said the study illustrates systemic problems in the U.S. patent system. They said recent court rulings and legislation that scaled back some patent rights only go so far in curbing what they consider a costly nuisance for businesses.
more
Source: The New York Times
6/25/2012
Professor Paul Goldstein, Stanford University, was quoted in the following article discussing how difficult it is to try brand impersonators with intellectual property violations.
Companies may disapprove, but the impersonators rarely, if ever, face any legal challenges, said Paul Goldstein, a Stanford Law School professor who specializes in intellectual property law. For one thing, there are too many of them, not just in Times Square but around the world. For another, the threat impersonators pose to the brand is usually too small to warrant an expensive lawsuit.
“You can’t just stamp out every little fire,” Mr. Goldstein said.
Fake Minnie Mouses and SpongeBob SquarePants — or Elmos spewing anti-Semitic chants — can tarnish a brand that companies have worked hard to establish as kid-friendly and clean, Mr. Goldstein said.
more
Source: American Public Media: Marketplace
6/4/2012
Story examines efforts by web browsers to put protection of personal data in the hands of consumers. Focus is on the upcoming release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10. Professor Lorrie Faith Cranor of Carnegie Mellon University is quoted.
“When [people] go to websites, their web browser is automatically going to be telling all those websites that this user doesn't want to be tracked,” says
Lorrie Cranor, associate professor of computer science and engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. “When the websites receive that message, what they're supposed to do is to not collect information about what the user has been doing at the website, and using it to target ads.
If you want to see ads that are more likely to appeal to you, if you opt out of tracking, then you're not going to get that. You're more likely to get generic ads, or all the ads for diet pills…If you want to stop seeing belly fat and hair loss ads, and get something that you might actually be interested in, then let them find out what you're interested in."
more
Source: Forbes
6/4/2012
Article by Professor Joshua Gans, University of Toronto, looks at the recent news that Facebook is considering opening up its social network to children younger than 13 years old.
It is worthwhile remarking that while I do not believe that Facebook are acting to “get them young” there are some commercial issues that are likely driving this. First,
Google Apps for
Education has made its way into schools. … Second, the millions of kids on Facebook are currently seeing ads.
Put simply, a parental supervised approach is like giving them training wheels for society. There are rules of interaction and norms of appropriate behavior. Either you believe parents have a role in helping kids with that or not. And at the moment what the law and Facebook’s official policy are saying is: when you turn 13 you are on your own. I don’t know about you but my preference is not to throw my thirteen year old into society unprepared.
more
Source: The New York Times
6/2/2012
Article explores ‘Pair,’ a new mobile app that enables sharing of content between two people in a relationship, and how it addresses privacy needs. Professor Andrea Matwyshyn, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is quoted.
People can’t always foresee or understand what could happen to their data,” Professor Matwyshyn said. “But they know they don’t want it ending up in the wrong hands."
more
Source: The New York Times
5/31/2012
The article looks at how Facebook turns a user’s affinity for something, when they “Like” an item, into a sponsored story which results as ads on friends’ Facebook pages. Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University School of Law, is quoted.
Eric Goldman, an associate professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law, took aim at Facebook for, as he
put it in a blog post, putting words in its users’ mouths. Facebook, he wrote, interprets a “like” as a statement of a user’s attitude and a “green light” to create an ad.
“So Sponsored Stories creates a zero-sum game,” Mr. Goldman wrote. “I as a user probably don’t get any value from the public presentation of my implicit endorsement (if anything, it might hurt my position with my friends), but Facebook and its advertisers benefit from it.”
more
Source: Ars Technica
5/23/2012
Article looks at the cost of high profile patent infringement cases, and specifically examines the Oracle v. Google case in which Oracle alleged that Android violates Java patents and copyrights. Professor R. Polk Wagner, University of Pennsylvania Law School, is quoted.
"I would assume this is a several million dollar trial," Penn Law Professor R. Polk Wagner told Ars today. "Six weeks is a long trial, plus the case was fairly complex. I would not be surprised if [Oracle's costs were] more than $10 million once you include the enormous amount of prep work."
Patent cases are often appealed to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, so "it is not wise to think of this as a 'final' statement on the patent issues (or, indeed, the copyright issues)," Wagner said. "It's better thought of as major development, but not the final word."
"It's unclear what Oracle's strategy was (or is), but potentially they could have sought fees or damages from anyone selling Android phones," Wagner said. "I'm hesitant to say it will have much effect. Smartphones have so many components—software and hardware—so the fact that these patents weren't found to be infringed has very little to do, I think, with the other litigation that's going on."
more
Source: The Washington Post
5/21/2012
Article discusses the Apple vs. Samsung mobile device patent case in which Apple claims that Samsung’s smartphones and tablet computers infringe patents covering the design and feel of iPhones and iPads, and Samsung’s infringement counterclaims related to its Galaxy smartphones. Mark Lemley, a Stanford Law School professor who specializes in intellectual property, comments on the recent order by U.S. District Judge Koh that the leaders of the companies meet for mediation in order to reach a resolution before a trial.
“It’s pretty common for judges to do this when the court is serious about trying to push a settlement, though rarely are the companies this big,” he [Professor Lemley] said in an e-mail.
“The parties will need to settle at some point in the future; they can each do far too much damage to the other to allow this to continue forever,” Lemley said.
“Each one has enough intellectual property to shut down the other’s products,” he said. “I don’t think either one can let that happen. So I think they will have to settle for money eventually. Which way it flows, and how much, I don’t know.”
more
Source: Today Online
5/16/2012
Article examines the numerous legal suits between technology firms and the impact on innovation.
Whether that pattern [stalemates concluding in cross-licensing] will hold in smartphones — or in areas such as social networking and online advertising — has yet to be seen. "Maybe this time it isn't a usual cycle," says Professor
Doug Lichtman of University of California, Los Angeles. "Patents are much more front and centre: People realise they can be sold and traded, they are much more visible."
more
Source: The Hill
5/15/2012
In his article for The Hill’s Congress Blog, Professor James Bessen, Boston University, explores how the patent wars being fought across the tech sector are hampering innovation. Below are a few excerpts from the article.
Despite earnest efforts by Congress to address it, our nation’s patent system has become a disincentive to innovation, at least in the tech industries.
In the world of smartphones, tablets and the Internet, patents have become just another offensive weapon in the business market place. Increasingly patents are not being used to protect legitimate innovation. Instead, older technology companies with large patent portfolios and non-practicing entities (trolls) use them solely to gain a financial edge or reduce competition. This has the effect of actually stifling economic and technological growth and harming consumers by depriving them of lowered costs and new innovations.
For the patent system to promote innovation most effectively, it must confer balanced rights with clear boundaries. Additionally, it’s important that patent disputes should not be unduly burdensome or costly, and damages should be predictable and commensurate with harm.
more
Source: The Los Angeles Times
5/1/2012
In this op-ed piece, Professor Pamela Samuelson, University of California Berkeley School of Law, discusses the copyright law challenges inherent in creating a digital collection of all the world's books. Below are a few excerpts from the article.
Copyright law poses considerable challenges, but any barriers to mass digitization of the world's books can — and should be — overcome.
Digital libraries containing millions of out-of-print and public domain works would vastly expand the scope of research and education worldwide, extending access to millions of people in undeveloped countries who don't have it now. It would also open up amazing opportunities for discovery of new knowledge. Being able to conduct searches over a corpus of millions of books allows researchers to learn things never before possible.
There are three promising strategies for removing barriers to a universal digital library: First, it should be considered "fair use" in copyright law for nonprofit libraries to circulate orphan works for their patrons for noncommercial purposes. Second, Congress should pass legislation to limit damages and injunctions for other reuses of orphan works. Third, the Copyright Office should explore a collective licensing program under which all in-copyright but out-of-print works could be made available, as some countries are now trying.
more
Source: The New York Times
4/30/2012
Article examines the security issues with mobile phone payments. “Mobile Payments: Consumer Benefits & New Privacy Concerns,” a new article and survey by Berkeley Center for Law & Technology Director Chris Hoofnagle and his colleagues Jennifer Urban and Su Li is prominently cited. The survey was financed by Nokia, which makes cellphones. The survey posed a variety of questions by phone to 1,200 people nationwide.
The most visceral reaction was elicited by a question that asked whether consumers would be willing to share “information about you with the stores that you visit, when you are just browsing.” An overwhelming 96 percent said they would “definitely not allow” or “probably not allow” it.
The researchers wrote that the new wave of mobile payment services could profoundly alter the relationship between customers and those service providers [such as Apple or eBay].
“Further,” they concluded, “there is no guarantee that this shift would be apparent to consumers using mobile payments systems to complete sales transactions.”
more
Source: Ars Technica
4/28/2012
Professor Eric Goldman, Director of Santa Clara High Tech Law Institute, comments on Ars Technica article about Bland v. Roberts, 2012. In this case the plaintiffs alleged they engaged in protected activities when “liking” a Facebook page that belonged to their boss’ opponent for sheriff. The court concluded that a Facebook like is not speech.
Here are a few excerpts from Professor Goldman’s comments:
Oh man, the technological implications of social media sure does baffle the judicial system. What does it mean to "friend" someone? What does it mean to "like" something? Most judges seem to want to curl up into a ball when posed with such thorny questions. Could you imagine a judge trying to grok what a Facebook "poke" means?
Listing a person's name as an endorser of a political candidate is core First Amendment activity. That's exactly what the "likes" did here.
more
Source: The New York Times
4/28/2012
Article explores the future of “smart” devices to carry out transactions. Alessandro Acquisti, Associate Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University, is quoted.
I recently described PayPal’s plans to Alessandro Acquisti, an economist who studies digital privacy at Carnegie Mellon University. Mr. Acquisti smiled. If today all you need to do is enter your phone number and PIN when you visit a store, perhaps tomorrow, he said, that store will be able to detect your phone by its unique identifier as soon as you enter. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, he went on, you won’t have to shop at all. Your vast piles of shopping data would be instead collected, analyzed and used to tell you exactly what you need: a new motorcycle from Ducati, perhaps, or purple rain boots in the next size for your growing child. Money will be seamlessly taken from your account. A delivery will arrive at your doorstep. “In the future, maybe you won’t have to pay,” Mr. Acquisti offered, only half in jest. “The transaction will be made for you.”
more
Source: Forbes
4/27/2012
Article examines antitrust allegations against Google and its dominant position in Internet search. Professor Nicholas Economides is quoted.
“If you are a company with 60% market share in the U.S. — or 35% to 40% market share in Europe — you have additional obligations that smaller companies don’t have,” said
Nicholas Economides, an antitrust expert at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Regulators want “to make sure competition is not restricted by companies with very large market share.”
“The big problem in the high-tech industry is companies can very quickly go from a small market share to high market share, and the culture doesn’t change so quickly,” Economides said. “They did the same things when they were at 15% market share and suddenly they’re at 60% and they’re in trouble.
more
Source: Forbes
4/27/2012
Article examines antitrust allegations against Google and its dominant position in Internet search. Professor Christopher Yoo is quoted.
“Many antitrust authorities are suspicious of competitor claims, when people say `They must be doing something wrong — they’re killing me,’” said
Christopher Yoo, who teaches antitrust law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “If they drive you out of business, it sucks to be you,” Yoo said, but that doesn’t necessarily mean antitrust laws have been broken.
“What the virtuous cycle of improvement requires companies to do is lay down terms of battle and tell competitors to get better or die,” Yoo said.
more
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
4/25/2012
Article examines the patent disputes between Oracle and Google; and specifically calls out the patent system flaws throughout the reviews of the infringement claims. Professor Mark Lemley, preeminent scholar of intellectual property law, and his paper, “Patent Quality and Settlement among Repeat Patent Litigants” are cited.
In fact, software patent holders lose nearly 90 percent of the time in litigation, Stanford law Professor Mark Lemley found in a research paper published last year.
Lemley believes the courts should play a more active role by dismissing outlandish damage requests, forcing trolls to cough up attorney fees and narrowing the scope of patent claims from broad descriptions to specific explanations of how the technology works.
more
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
4/25/2012
Article examines the patent disputes between Oracle and Google; and specifically calls out the patent system flaws throughout the reviews of the infringement claims. James Bessen, currently researcher of technological innovation, including patents, and his book that he co-authored with Michael Meurer, “Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk” are cited.
"It's approaching crisis levels," said James Bessen, a lecturer at Boston University School of Law and co-author of "Patent Failure." "In most industries, the patent system has become a disincentive to innovation."
Bessen said Congress should tighten those standards, while significantly boosting application fees for patents, in an effort to discourage companies from seeking or holding on to frivolous patents.
"There's a cost to society of having that many patents, so there should be essentially a use tax," he said. "Many of these duplicate, garbage patents would not be renewed."
more
Source: Knowledge@Wharton
4/25/2012
Article examines how major technology companies can easily replicate a less-established competitor’s innovative offerings or features, and asks if it is possible for an upstart to compete effectively. Andrea Matwyshyn, Assistant Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics with the Wharton School, is quoted.
… Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor
Andrea Matwyshyn notes that "competing with Facebook means competing with its platform as well as everything it knows about you. It's a new type of barrier of entry. A new entrant to the market may not serve up the audience quickly and with the precision Facebook can." Although
social media is the most obvious relationship-based industry, Matwyshyn says web businesses overall have similar characteristics. "Web models are the vehicle for relationships," she notes. "The companies that further the relationship with the human on the other side win."
more
Source: Knowledge@Wharton
4/25/2012
Article examines how major technology companies can easily replicate a less-established competitor’s innovative offerings or features, and asks if it is possible for an upstart to compete effectively. Kevin Werbach, Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School of Business, shares his expertise.
Businesses copying each other's features to stay competitive is nothing new, notes Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor
Kevin Werbach. The difference in the tech sector -- and particularly on the Internet -- is that it's easier. Firms in that space are typically selling virtual goods, and incumbents can often replicate new features with the expertise and equipment they already have in house.
"The network effect is strong, and there are ways that sites [can try to retain] users, but it doesn't always work," notes Werbach, who cites MySpace as a first mover in social networking that unraveled.
Start-ups have other advantages, too. For instance, start-ups don't have user bases and revenue streams to protect. Start-ups can also focus on a niche that hasn't been seen or acknowledged by a large company. "The advantage to a start-up is being nimble," Werbach notes. "Hundreds of start-ups will fail or be acquired, but some will have tremendous success."
"Patents are a legal monopoly and a potent weapon, especially if a start-up doesn't have the resources to fight," Werbach says. "Overall,
patent wars are a bad thing for innovation, but they are logical. I'm not thrilled with patent wars, but I understand why companies use them."
more
Source: Daily Business Review
4/25/2012
Article is about hologram technology, and specifically the appearance of Tupac Shakur’s hologram performing live on stage with Snoop Dogg at a recent Coachella festival.
One IP issue that has been discussed recently is ownership and usage of a dead person's image. As
Ryan Calo, the director for privacy and robotics at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, observed, "if the fear of dying weren't bad enough, suddenly you lose control over aspects of your legacy."
more
Source: The Enquirer-Herald
4/24/2012
Article discusses how the use of social media can provide a leg up in business.
Chris Jay Hoofnagle of the University of California-Berkeley believes employers may pull back from cyber-spying as they realize the downside. "Knowledge can mean liability," said Hoofnagle, the director of information privacy programs at Berkeley's Center for Law and Technology. "What happens when you learn your star employee has a problem? You have to do something about it."
more
Source: ABC News
4/24/2012
Article is about a $13.8 million judgment from a jury in a defamation lawsuit against anonymous posters on the Internet forum Topix.com. Though found not guilty of an accusation of sexual assault, a Texas couple and one of their employees were accused of being sexual deviants, molesters, and drug dealers by the anonymous posters on Topix.com.
Ryan Calo, who teaches privacy law at Stanford Law School, said the $13 million figure "strikes me as a very large award."
"Defamation is one area of law in which a jury or court have to figure out how much damage has been done," he said. "It's not a car accident where you can calculate medical bills and how much work was lost after an injury. There's something more ephemeral in a reputation."
"Everyone knows people say crazy things on the Internet, especially when they do it anonymously," he said.
Given the large amount of the award, Calo said it could have a chilling effect on legitimate speech. "If the award is upheld, then people will think twice about what they say," he said.
more
Source: National Public Radio
4/23/2012
Given that on the Internet, it's easy to find like-minded people and to frequent sites whose content you already agree with, NPR’s Intelligence Squared U.S. debate explored “When It Comes to Politics, the Internet Is Closing Our Minds.” Siva Vaidhyanathan, Associate Professor of Media Studies with the University of Virginia, participated. Below are a few excerpts from his arguments for the motion.
So here in 2012, or now in 2012, we are not all holding virtual hands with our Facebook friends across the globe singing, "We are the world." There is no coordinated global movement for justice. … The dominant powers governing our digital experiences, the state, for instance, in China, or corporations in Brazil or the United States are not interested in such matters. They are not interested in us being political. Sometimes these powers actively restrict us, like in China. More often than not, these powers seduce us into shallow consumption, consumptive behaviors like shopping or giggling at cats or clicking on cows. Not that there's anything wrong with clicking on virtual cows, but it ain't political.
We could build platforms that enhance Republican deliberation and extend cosmopolitan perspectives. We just haven't done that yet. We've been really busy clicking on cows. But all that takes work. It takes real human work in addition to invention and imagination, real human effort. … When it comes to politics, the Internet, most importantly how we experience the Internet is closing our minds one cow click at a time.
more
Source: National Journal
4/23/2012
Article examines the Federal Trade Commission’s review of two mergers that critics say could hamper the growth of the new digital-music platforms. Universal Music Group is seeking approval to buy EMI’s record label, while an investment group led by Sony is pursuing the green light to purchase EMI’s music-publishing business. Andy Gavil, Howard University professor of antitrust law, complex litigation, and federal regulation, is quoted.
Howard University law professor Andrew Gavil said that the FTC will have to consider whether to “analyze it as if there are four big labels or is it a more complicated or nuanced analysis. I think it’s the latter. You can’t just go by traditional market share.”
At the same time, Gavil and others note that Universal and other labels are hardly in a position these days to dictate terms to major distributors, which for physical CDs include retail giants like Wal-Mart and for digital providers like iTunes. ... And given that online piracy of music remains a significant problem, it would hardly be in Universal’s interest to block new and legitimate ways of distributing its music online, Gavil added.
The record companies “have a lot of interest in channeling people into legal ways of getting music,” he said.
more
Source: The Wall Street Journal
4/21/2012
The article examines the growing use of unmanned aircraft, known as drones, in America.
Ryan Calo, who conducts research into privacy and robotics at Stanford Law School, said the domestic use of drones will likely grow as more machines are brought back from war and as prices fall.
"The very same drone that was staking out a nest of insurgents and possibly shooting them could be deployed in New York for surveillance" after removal of weaponry, Mr. Calo said. He said the use of drones could spark a wider debate about privacy because people aren't accustomed to such technology. "If you bring back a tank from Afghanistan, you don't expect it to show up in a park," he said.
more
Source: The Hill
4/20/2012
In this op-ed piece for The Hill, Professor Peter Swire examines the proposed cybersecurity legislation. He stresses, “We should be very cautious about passing cybersecurity legislation this year.”
Additional excerpts from this piece:
The Senate bills and the Precise Act, especially its subcommittee version, have run into opposition from major industry actors who question whether such rules would achieve their intended goal of responding to fast-changing cybersecurity attacks. Complying with such rules will impede innovation, both in general and for cybersecurity itself.
[Concerning the proposed act, CISPA:]
The overly broad definitions, however, still exist. They enable companies to share detailed information about their customers with the government and other companies — without telling their customers, and without a close link to actual cyber threats.
In conclusion, the cybersecurity bills before Congress are not likely to significantly improve cybersecurity, might actually undermine it while impeding technological innovation and could pose serious threats to long-established privacy and civil-liberty protections.
more
Source: Yahoo! News
4/19/2012
Article discusses the controversies over the creation of a digitally reincarnated Tupac Shakur for a performance at the Coachella festival.
"We're beginning to live in a world where it's extremely difficult for people to determine what is real from what is not real,"
Ryan Calo, the director for privacy and robotics at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, observes in an interview with Yahoo!. "It's kind of a technology vertigo."
more
Source: The New York Times
4/12/2012
Article discusses Apple’s strategy with entering the e-book business, and the recent Department of Justice’s lawsuit over e-book price-fixing. Nicholas Economides is quoted.
“I think this is a strong case,” said Nicholas Economides, a professor of economics at New York University. “The way U.S. antitrust law is written, in a conspiracy case it does not have to show adverse effects on consumers.”
more
Source: The New York Times
4/12/2012
Article discusses Apple’s strategy with entering the e-book business, and the recent Department of Justice’s lawsuit over e-book price-fixing. Mark Lemley is quoted.
Mark Lemley, a law professor at Stanford specializing in antitrust and intellectual property, said he did not expect Apple to give up easily in the case. “Apple has a history of being fairly aggressive in litigation,” Mr. Lemley said. “There’s some sense in their corporate culture that we’re right.”
more
Source: Ars Technica
4/12/2012
Article delves into statements from the Commerce Department’s recent report on the importance of intellectual property. Looking into whether the patent system should get credit for the growth of patent-intensive IT firms, the work of James Bessen, Lecturer in Law, and Professor Michael Meurer, both of Boston University, is referenced.
For example, in a
groundbreaking 2008 book,
James Bessen and
Michael Meurer estimated the value of patents and the costs of patent litigation in a variety of industries during the 1980s and 1990s. They found that in chemical industries, the value of patents significantly exceeded the costs of patent litigation, suggesting that patents may be having the desired effect of rewarding innovation.
However, in most other industries—and especially in the software industry—the costs of patent litigation began to exceed the value of patents in the middle of the 1990s. … And things have only gotten worse since then—last year
Bessen and
Meurer updated their work and estimated that patent trolls cost publicly traded defendants
half a trillion dollars between 1990 and 2010.
more
Source: Investors.com
4/11/2012
Article examines the Department of Justice’s case against Apple and five major book publishers on antitrust charges over conspiring to raise e-book prices. TAP academic Nicholas Economides is quoted.
"If you try to buy a book now, you often will see that the price of the electronic or digital version is higher than the price of the hard-cover version, which is completely absurd," said Nicholas Economides, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business.
Addressing a comment that this is a "fairly conventional price fixing case"…
And if so, it's odd such companies would have conspired on something that looks on its face to be illegal, Economides says.
more
Source: ABC News
4/5/2012
Professor
Peter Swire, Moritz College of Law of the Ohio State University, joined the conversation about Google’s Project Glass. These glasses could help you get a weather forecast by looking up at the sky, or find out about subway delays by standing outside the station.
Peter Swire, a privacy and cybersecurity expert and professor at Ohio State, has similar worries when it comes to the glasses. “Advertising won’t skip this platform, but there will be ongoing battles about how pervasive the ads will be and how users will turn them off.”
Swire also brings up the tracking issue of the glasses and the fact that Google’s Android software does not give the user a choice about location tracking for each app; it’s a system-wide setting. “Will Google Glasses use the same all-or-nothing approach?” Swine asked. “We have got ‘Do not Call’ and ‘Do not Track;’ we will see if we get ‘Do not See.’”
more
Source: Hillicon Valley
3/31/2012
Article discusses the implementation challenges of a Do Not Track feature online. TAP scholar
Ed Felten, on leave from Princeton University while serving as the Chief Technology Officer with the Federal Trade Commission is quoted.
Ed Felten, the FTC's chief technologist, said the goal of Do Not Track is to "give consumers choice with online behavioral tracking."
"Many consumers are concerned about the collection of information across websites," Felten said.
Felten said the "gap" between the FTC's idea of Do Not Track and the advertising industry's commitment is the result of broad exemptions the advertisers have identified for when companies can still collect data on a user who has selected the Do Not Track option.
more
Source: The Atlantic
3/29/2012
This article highlights Helen Nissenbaum’s approach to privacy and how her article, "A Contextual Approach to Privacy Online" and book, Privacy in Context, has influenced federal regulators and legislators. Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of both Media, Culture, and Communication and Computer Science at New York University, and she is also Coordinator and Senior Faculty Fellow of the Information Law Institute.
Given the intellectual influence she's [Helen Nissenbaum] had, it's important to understand how what she's saying is different from other privacy theorists. The standard explanation for privacy freakouts is that people get upset because they've "lost control" of data about themselves or there is simply too much data available. Nissenbaum argues that the real problem "is the inapproproriateness of the flow of information due to the mediation of technology." In her scheme, there are senders and receivers of messages, who communicate different types of information with very specific expectations of how it will be used.
Nissenbaum gets us past thinking about privacy as a binary: either something is private or something is public. Nissenbaum puts the context -- or social situation -- back into the equation. What you tell your bank, you might not tell your doctor. What you tell your friend, you might not tell your father-in-law. … Furthermore, these differences in information sharing are not bad or good; they are just the norms.
Well, she wants to import the norms from the offline world into the online world. When you go to a bank, she says, you have expectations of what might happen to your communications with that bank. That should be true whether you're online, on the phone, or at the teller. Companies can use your data to do bank stuff, but they can't sell your data to car dealers looking for people with a lot of cash on hand.
more
Source: The Wall Street Journal
3/24/2012
Another
Wall Street Journal book review of
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s new book,
Why Nation’s Fail is by William Easterly. Below are a few excerpts.
The arrival of "Why Nations Fail" is thus a hugely welcome event, since economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson take on the big questions and in doing so present a substantial alternative to the dominant thinking about global poverty.
For Messrs. Acemoglu and Robinson, it is institutions that determine the fate of nations. Success comes, the authors say, when political and economic institutions are "inclusive" and pluralistic, creating incentives for everyone to invest in the future. Nations fail when institutions are "extractive," protecting the political and economic power of only a small elite that takes income from everyone else.
Messrs. Acemoglu and Robinson note that the Soviets experienced rapid growth in the 1950s and 1960s but then, hamstrung by an economy unable to innovate, fell into stagnation and collapse. The authors make a bold prediction: "The spectacular growth rates in China will slowly evaporate," and the Chinese will ultimately follow the Soviet trajectory.
more
Source: Network World
3/23/2012
The article examines the practice of employers asking for the login information of job applicants’ social media accounts.
Andrea Matwyshyn, Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, provides her expertise to this topic.
Overall, Matwyshyn says employers using social media to track and potentially vet candidates is a concerning practice.
The industries it is most common in, Matwyshyn says, are highly regulated ones, such as financial services, government and public positions or in which security clearances may be needed. Another area she's seen increased traction of social media monitoring is in customer-facing jobs and marketing positions. "From an employer's perspective, if they are putting an individual in a client or public-facing position, the way that candidate represents him or herself online could be an indication of the tone, professionalism and demeanor the individual may bring to the professional setting," she says.
Users that give up their login and password information, Matwyshyn says, are showing the disregard they have for personal privacy. It also demonstrates, Matwyshyn says, a power imbalance between employers and perspective employees.
"In the past in real space, we've been able to carve out different identities for different contexts," she says. "In this online realm, when those different identities are all blended together and employers usurp the access to those identities, it can be an alarming trend for individuals."
more
Source: The Huffington Post
3/21/2012
In this article,
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson discuss key points from their new book,
Why Nation’s Fail, within the context of China's potential for continued economic growth. Below are a few excerpts:
Our research on national economies throughout world history shows that long-term economic growth, while indeed based on technological innovation, only sustains itself in the presence of democratic political institutions that provide people with incentives to innovate. China may continue to grow in the near term, but the limited rights it affords its citizens places major restrictions on the country's longer-term possibilities for prosperity.
To create innovation more broadly, people need incentives such as the right to their own labor, to business profits, and to patents.
However, the biggest questions about China's future growth do not involve its next economic investments, but rather, its political essence. Unless China fundamentally reforms its political institutions, a change that seems unlikely in the short term, a trajectory of economic growth followed by relative decline is more likely than a trajectory of long-term increasing prosperity.
more
Source: American Public Media’s Marketplace
3/19/2012
Story looks at online piracy and the efforts of Internet service providers (ISPs) to combat this illegal downloading.
Doug Lichtman, Professor of Law at UCLA, is quoted.
That's your first warning, telling you to cut it out with the illegal downloading. Doug Lichtman from UCLA School of Law says the idea is that should end it. “The hope is that just sending this notification will get a lot of people to say you know what, I don't want to be a part of this. I'm happy to pay for content, and do it legitimately,” he says.
If that first warning goes unheeded, it escalates into… more emails! “After the first warning, what do you get? A second warning,” says Lichtman. “After the second, what do you get? A third warning. Basically it's communication.”
Exactly what ISPs plan to do is still up in the air. But Lichtman thinks the approach will have a big impact on the casual pirate. He says, “Once we remind folks this isn't anonymous and it is wrong, I think most people will realize I don't want to do this,” he says. “Just like in music. Roll back six, seven years, and a lot of us were getting our music illegally online, then iTunes rolls out, gives us a way to do it legitimately, and we opt for that. I'm happy to give a dollar, two dollars to get my music completely clean and do the right thing. For all content, hopefully we're going to turn that same corner.”
more
Source: The Atlantic
3/19/2012
…as Cranor and McDonald put it, is that "people who think they have already lost the ability to control private information ... may value privacy less." If, post-facto, you inform people that you're already using their data, they won't pay to stop you. But if you ask beforehand, they might. So, the companies making the data-tracking tools have serious incentive to erode the idea of privacy not just because they can make (more) money, but because privacy erosion leads to more privacy erosion. The system is self-reinforcing. This is a problem.
more
Source: Forbes
3/18/2012
This article looks at
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s new book,
Why Nation’s Fail in the context of Constructal Law flow systems. Below is the introduction.
Whether they realize it or not, economists
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson are constructal theorists. Their new book,
Why Nations Fail, “answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are?” The authors answer their own question with a definitive “no” and then go on to, “conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or the lack of it).”
more
Source: Ars Technica
3/18/2012
This article delves into Yahoo’s patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook. Professor
R. Polk Wagner, Pennsylvania Law School, shares his expertise in patent law.
"This is the issue with patent law, until we spend millions of dollars litigating these patents we really don't have a good sense of how strong they are, what they actually cover, whether they're valid or not valid," Penn Law Professor R. Polk Wagner told Ars. "Patents are merely hunting licenses and nothing more. They simply give you the ability to claim against somebody else and they're subject to attack on a number of grounds."
"What the Yahoo patents appear to be doing looks pretty similar to what Facebook is doing," Wagner said. "On the other hand, patents like this that have pretty broad claims often have problems in terms of the amount of prior art that can be used against them."
In terms of building a defensive patent portfolio, "it looks like Facebook is not there yet," Wagner said. "Given Facebook's funding and valuation I'm quite sure they are attempting to rectify that problem. My guess is they're filing enormous amounts of patents on any innovations they can come up with at this point."
more
Source: The Wall Street Journal
3/16/2012
The main claim of "Why Nations Fail" is twofold. First, differences in institutions—not geography or culture—are the key explanation for differences in wealth around the globe. Second, those differences are often a result of historical accidents, such as the different colonization strategies adopted in different regions of the Americas.
What emerges from "How Nations Fail" is a thorough economic theory of institutional change.
more
Source: SF Gate/San Francisco Chronicle
3/16/2012
Article looks into the patent infringement lawsuit Yahoo has filed against Facebook. Professor
Mark Lemley of Stanford Law School, widely recognized as a preeminent scholar of intellectual property, provides his insights.
"Even technology companies who acquire their patents for purely defensive purposes may change their mind as they do less well in the marketplace," Mark Lemley, a Stanford Law School professor who isn't involved in the case, said in an e-mail. "Yahoo! isn't a patent troll, but they are the latest example of a company that sues for patent infringement in hopes of supplementing a failing revenue base."
Stanford's Lemley said data he collected shows that the number of patent suits against a company rises around the time of its IPO.
"In the short run, Yahoo! may stand to make money by suing Facebook," Lemley said. "But in the long run it's not a good sign for them as a technology company."
more
Source: Forbes
3/15/2012
This article was written by
Richard Epstein, Professor of Law at New York University Law School. Below are a few excerpts.
Quite simply, the current FDA conflict of interest rules regard doctors and scientists with any financial connections with drug and device manufacturers as corrupt shills, who should be banished from its sacred precincts. Yet it takes an all-too-tolerant position to such “pure” advisors like Sidney Wolfe, from Public Citizen, who has served on the FDA’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee since 2008, despite being an avowed enemy of the industry and a close ally to plaintiff’s lawyers who launch multibillion dollar class action suits against drug companies…
Congress should thus reform the FDA’s conflict-of-interest regime, heeding the case of the patients’ groups testifying before them – who know that knowledge foregone at the FDA translates into cures delayed and lives lost.
more
Source: The Washington Post
3/15/2012
Article asks if government regulation strangling the economic recovery, and looks at the IPO market for guideposts. TAP scholar
Josh Lerner, Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School, is quoted.
The IPO market “has never really recovered from the 2000 collapse” of Internet startups, says Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner, a venture capital expert. “There are some spectacular (successes) — the YouTubes, Googles and Facebooks. Where there’s a drying up is midlevel companies.” From 1985 to 2000, the annual number of IPOs averaged 154, reports the National Venture Capital Association. In 2011, there were 52.
more
Source: The Wall Street Journal
3/14/2012
Given that some corporate leaders and politicians say Silicon Valley's traditional way of pushing innovation is in need of repair, prizes for major innovations are proliferating. This article explores those competitions and their potential to spur innovation. Josh Lerner, Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School, was interviewed to bring his expertise into the exploration.
"There is an appetite for exploring fresh approaches," says Josh Lerner, a professor at Harvard Business School. He is a co-author of recent research that found competitions can have a positive effect on innovation, based on an increase in patents awarded when the 19th century Royal Agricultural Society of England held competitions for agricultural innovations like new reaping techniques.
But he notes that competitions have drawbacks too, such as the difficulty of determining how much an innovation is worth in prize money before it is used.
more
Source: The Christian Science Monitor
3/14/2012
This article examines “the year of Big Data,” referring to the gathering, disseminating, and capitalizing on the vast amount of personal, user-generated information available online.
Joseph Turow, professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and associate dean for Graduate Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, shares his expertise on consumers and privacy.
However, “most consumers don’t understand the value of their personal data, and will willingly give up much in exchange for a quick return,” says Joseph Turow.
“We have to understand this from the perspective of the beginning of a century of big data,” he says, noting that it is not enough to simply put up intermediary companies. “People have to begin to engage with this issue and understand it, because data is the oxygen of the Internet,” he says, adding with a rueful laugh, “and if we don’t fully understand this it could suffocate us.”
more
Source: Knowledge @ Wharton
3/14/2012
This article examines the vertical integration business model of Apple, and how other leading tech companies are incorporating similar business strategies.
Andrea Matwyshyn, Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, provides her perspective on the impact of this business model on innovation.
Andrea Matwyshyn, a legal studies and business ethics professor at Wharton, has similar concerns. "Vertical integration is desirable for some products, but you need multiple models in the technology industry," she says. "If every tech company followed Apple, there would be a degree of novelty and innovation lost. In some ways, you can make the case that more vertical integration could mean less innovation.”
Matwyshyn predicts that many technology companies currently trying to integrate software and hardware will back off in a few years. "In 10 years, these companies are going to look a lot different," says Matwyshyn. "Every industry has periods where vertical integration looks better. A few years ago, everyone was outsourcing."
more
Source: The New York Times
3/13/2012
Journalist Adam Davidson interviewed Daron Acemoglu, Economics Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about his soon to be released new book “Why Nations Fail.” Co-written with James Robinson, the book delves into answers for why some nations are rich and others are poor.
According to Acemoglu’s thesis, when a nation’s institutions prevent the poor from profiting from their work, no amount of disease eradication, good economic advice or foreign aid seems to help.
Acemoglu and Robinson are on the pessimistic side of optimism about the United States’ chances of a resurgence. Congress, they told me, is too heavily influenced by the wealthy, and the advent of super PACs has only given elites more power. Yet Acemoglu surprised me when he said he was encouraged by the rise of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. While neither has an especially coherent or subtle economic agenda, both show that, however frustrated they might be, large numbers of Americans still believe they can influence the political process to improve their fortunes. Since the future of American economic health lies in its people, Acemoglu explained, as long as Americans believe they can influence the process, they will.
more
Source: CNN Money
3/12/2012
Article explores “Klik,” a new iPhone app that automatically displays your friends' names in real time when they appear in view of your iPhone's camera.
Alessandro Acquisti, professor of IT and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College provides his expertise on privacy on social networks and with facial recognition technologies.
“Currently applications such as Klik tell you not to worry because it's through consent and just with your friends,” says Alessandro Acquisti. “But in the long-run, there will be no technological barriers that would prevent something that could do this not just with your friends but anyone out in the wild.”
As processing speeds improve, face recognition experts believe apps like Klik will someday be capable of identifying most people in real time -- regardless of whether they're connected to you or willing participants.
"In my opinion, this is one of the most problematic aspects of the trajectory we are clearly on," Acquisti said.
more
Source: The Huffington Post
3/11/2012
In this article,
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson discuss key points from their new book,
Why Nation’s Fail, within the context of U.S. financial inequality. Below are a few excerpts:
Any discussion of inequality should distinguish economic inequality from inequality of opportunity and from political inequality.
Prosperity depends on innovation, and we waste our innovative potential if we do not provide a level playing field for all: we don't know where the next Microsoft, Google, or Facebook will come from, and if the person who will make this happen goes to a failing school and cannot get into a good university, the chances that it will become a reality are much diminished.
The real danger to our prosperity lies in political inequality. The U.S. generated so much innovation and economic growth for the last 200 years because, by and large, it rewarded innovation and investment. This did not happen in a vacuum; it was supported by a particular set of political arrangements -- inclusive political institutions -- which prevented an elite or another narrow group from monopolizing political power and using it for their own benefit and at the expense of society.
more
Source: All Things D
3/11/2012
Article reports on danah boyd’s presentation at the SXSW Interactive festival on how social networks and the media can accelerate certain ideas (sometimes falsely) that create fear and anxiety.
Information overload makes us numb, but things that freak us out have a rare ability to break through and capture our attention, Boyd said. As she put it, “The attention economy provides fertile ground for the culture of fear.”
In fact, examining historical data shows that kids bullying each other actually isn’t on the rise, Boyd contended. It’s just that now parents have a window into their children’s online actions, so they’re freaking out about the rise of cyberbullying.
more
Source: Philly.com/Philadelphia Inquirer
3/10/2012
Given Google’s new privacy policy instituted in early March, this article offers reactions from privacy thought leaders. Joseph Turow, professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, is one of the scholars interviewed.
People feel creeped out about this sharing of private information. But they are allowing it, partly because they want to get stuff done, also because they don't know how to stop it, and because they don't yet see an urgent reason to do so.
more
Source: The Washington Post
3/9/2012
[Most developers don’t check for infringement.] This, of course, is excellent news for patent trolls. As a trio of Boston University researchers —
James E. Bessen, Michael J. Meurer, and Jennifer Laurissa Ford —
recently found, infringement lawsuits filed by companies that aren’t even using their patents (known as “non-practicing entities”) have skyrocketed since 1990, costing the economy $500 billion over that timeframe and depressing innovation.
more
Source: American Public Media’s Marketplace
3/9/2012
This article looks at the recent news that the Department of Justice is getting ready to sue Apple as well as five publishers over anti-competitive practices related to the cost of e-books. Joshua Gans, University of Toronto Rotman School of Management, comments on whether the Department of Justice has a case for collusion.
If all the publishers got together and agreed to work together to raise the price of e-books, that's collusion and that’s illegal.
But Joshua Gans, an economist at the University of Toronto says anything short of that smoking gun is a gray area. “If they individually signed a contract with Apple not to discount anywhere in order to get their content on the Apple bookstore, that's a murkier area,” he says. “If you had a market where this practice had been going on for 20 years, and you'd seen that innovation was hardly occurring at all and prices were staying high, you'd look at these practices and frown upon them as they did in the credit industry, but for a newer market like this, it's really hard to say.”
more
Source: Fast Company
3/8/2012
danah boyd is interviewed about her email-management practices including taking email sabbaticals. danah boyd is a senior researcher at Microsoft, an assistant professor at New York University, and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
I’m a big believer in being able to set boundaries and walk away. And that’s actually why the email sabbatical to me is really important. I’m really willing to work like a dog 11 months of the year, but one month of the year I want a time frankly to get bored. Because I find that in a state of boredom, which I don’t reach very easily, is where a lot of crazy ideas are formed.
more
Source: The New York Times
3/8/2012
Article looks at the investigation by the Justice Department of pricing collusion between Apple and electronic book publishers. Randall Picker, University of Chicago Law School, offered his expertise in competition policy and antitrust.
Randal C. Picker, a professor at the University of Chicago who teaches antitrust law, said that the emerging market of e-books could have influenced Justice Department investigators to intervene.
“We think we’re on the cusp of this transition,” Professor Picker said. “If you’re the D.O.J., you recognize that at this point of transition, it’s really important to get these competitive arrangements right.”
more
Source: American Public Media’s Marketplace
3/8/2012
Article examines a recent report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis about the health of the economy in the fourth quarter of 2011. It shows a 20 percent spike in investment, a sign that businesses are back to spending, not hoarding, their money. Daron Acemoglu, Economics Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was interviewed for his insights.
I think businesses are starting to spend finally. So I think we have probably turned a corner.
The rebound in employment (might) come even later than the other jobless recoveries we have experienced in the last two decades.
more
Source: The Huffington Post
3/7/2012
Article looks at the impact on privacy with the upcoming use of drones in U.S. airspace for law enforcement and commercial purposes. The author references an article by
M. Ryan Calo, Director of Privacy and Robotics at Stanford Center for Internet & Society, titled, “
The Drone as Privacy Catalyst.”
"Citizens do not generally enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy in public, nor even in the portions of their property visible from a public vantage,"
writes Ryan Calo... "Neither the Constitution nor common law appears to prohibit police or the media from routinely operating surveillance drones in urban and other environments."
As evidence, Calo points to a 1986 Supreme Court case which upholds the right of local police to fly over residents' backyards without a search warrant. In addition, in 1989, the Supreme Court admitted evidence from a police officer in a helicopter who peeked through two missing panels in a greenhouse and saw a marijuana growing operation.
On a brighter note, Calo believes that the egregious violations of privacy rights that drones represent "could be just the visceral jolt society needs to drag privacy law into the twenty-first century."
more
Source: U.S. News
3/7/2012
This article examines the buzz that is preceding the release of the new iPad. Professor Shane Greenstein, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, provides his insights.
What they're [Apple] doing is they're simultaneously competing with themselves and competing with a paranoid vision of what they want to avoid in the medium- to long-term.
Greenstein adds that Apple's upgrade wasn't driven by sales; iPad 2 sales have remained strong. Unveiling the new product, however, may draw in a new wave of customers. "They will use the new upgrade as a way to get a bit of publicity and try to get the attention of a new adopter, because they're still in the new adopter phase," he says.
more
Source: The Atlantic
3/6/2012
“We propose that when investors invent new financial products, they be forbidden to market them until they receive approval from a government agency designed along the lines of the FDA, which screens pharmaceutical innovations," the pair writes. "The agency would approve financial products if and only if they satisfy a test for social utility. The test centers around a simple market analysis: is the product likely to be used more often for hedging or speculation?"
In their view, "Economic theory teaches us that finance is much like medicine. Individuals' optimal investment portfolios differ between individuals relatively little, except in ways that can be readily observed and described based on a small number of individual characteristics."
"In the current, highly polarized political environment, it is easy to predict that many people will regard our proposal as an excessively radical reform, one that is inconsistent with free market traditions in the Unites States. It is therefore important to emphasize that or proposal in large part revives an old regulatory system that served the United States well until it was dismantled in the 1990s."
E. Glen Weyl is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. He also spends each June in Toulouse, France as a fellow at the Toulouse School of Economics.
Eric Posner is the Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law at the University of Chicago.
more
Source: The Washington Post
3/5/2012
Article shows how technological innovation with mobile devices and the growing number of apps that are developed for them are providing a boost to employment in the U.S. As an example, the article points to a study completed by
Erik Brynjolfsson and his colleagues that analyzed 179 publicly-traded companies last year and found that those adopting data-driven decision making were about 5 percent more productive and profitable than their competitors.
The effects on productivity will be ‘‘as great or greater than what they were in the 1990s,’’ Brynjolfsson said. Labor- force productivity grew at an average annual rate of 2.1 percent during that decade, up from 1.5 percent in the 1980s.
more
Source: Knowledge@ Wharton
3/5/2012
"Social media has great potential benefit," says Andrea M. Matwyshyn, assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton Business School. "It has changed the dynamics of organization, such as the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street movements. On the other hand, social media have complicated privacy protection. Service providers can locate any political dissident through a device or software."
"The new communication tools have transformed social movements and communication," Matwyshyn says. "Governments are training a digital army at an advanced level, to the same extent as the regular one. They confront a new type of organization which is often decentralized."
more
Source: Philly.com
3/5/2012
Interview with Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University School of Law, discusses the loss of control over personal in